


Lives of Quiet Desperation

by asuralucier



Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - Bennett
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Post-Canon, canon minor character death, job changes, long suffering friends, past student/teacher relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 07:41:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15903870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/pseuds/asuralucier
Summary: Although, why would it be inappropriate? He is no longer a sixth former trying to con his former teacher into having a drink with him out of gratitude.Ten years after attending Cutler's, Dakin leaves law for journalism.





	Lives of Quiet Desperation

**Author's Note:**

> Repost of a fic from 2010 after minor edits. Originally written for Round 1 of Small Fandom Big Bang 2010.

Scripps is offended the first time Dakin broaches the subject to him. It’s been years and years -- almost ten years, but Scripps is the one that is always nearby. Which works out rather well on Dakin’s part, because Scripps is the only one who puts up with it; he has the patience of a saint, or at least, aspires to own something close.   
  
“You can’t just up and decide one day that you want to do journalism out of nowhere, it doesn’t work like that.”   
  
It is Sunday, and Scripps’ flat is much smaller than his own, but much tidier. The kitchen perpetually reeks of coffee, but it’s not an unpleasant smell. Dakin shrugs: the world rarely works as he wants it to anymore. “Oh, come on, I’m just asking for a leg up. It’s not as if I’m going to start invading your territory.”   
  
Scripps looks exasperated. “...Honestly, what’s wrong with law?” He pours coffee for both of them and spoons thick cream into the cups. He’s becoming quite fond of having cream in his coffee as of late. It’s perhaps an acquired taste that comes with age, although neither of them have hit thirty.   
  
“Nothing’s wrong with law.” Dakin shrugs for the second time. “I’m good at it, and my flat’s bigger than yours, thanks to it...it’s dull.” He hopes he sounds convincing.  
  
There is a long silence, Scripps opens and closes his mouth several times before he finally finds the right words. “It’s...dull? You haven’t even been practicing that long, you can’t change professions like you change girlfriends. It’s impractical.” (Although Dakin has been a tax lawyer for a little over three years now, he’s never kept a girlfriend for that long; the analogy is a bit off).  
  
“It’s just dull. If you had to spend the rest of your life doing fucking taxes, you’d think it’s dull.” Dakin picks up his cup and presses his lips thoughtfully to the rim. “Journalism isn’t like that; you’ll get to see things, different people. It isn’t going to be...boring.” He’s probably said ‘dull’ too many times already.   
  
It’s irritating, but Scripps thinks that he has every right to be suspicious. “I warned you about reading law. So did Lockwood.”   
  
“Of course I’d never listen to either of you.”  
  
And yet, Dakin makes it a habit to disrupt Scripps’ quiet Sunday afternoons. It’s something of a conundrum. “Right.”   
  
“You’re a right wanker,” Dakin says, most likely because he’s run out of things to actually say.   
  
Scripps just raises a mildly amused eyebrow at his friend (loosely defined). He doesn’t say anything, because if he does, Dakin will try to come up with something else stupid in order to have the last word. Dakin always has to have the last word; he’s infuriating like that.   
  
“Will you at least think on it?”   
  
“I’ll think on it.” The coffee is a tad too sweet. Scripps hopes that he sounds mostly noncommittal. “And you have no background in journalism, that doesn’t change. Recommendations only go so far.”   
  
“I still read history at Oxford.” Dakin actually tries hard not to make a face after taking a sip of his coffee. “Can’t you mention that?”   
  
“I’ll mention it, sure, but I don’t know what good it’s going to do you.” There is a long, long pause again and Scripps looks Dakin up and down, trying to make sense of him, perhaps. Dakin is doomed never to make sense to anyone. “Dakin, are you sure...you’re all right?”   
  
“Yeah, I am. I’m pretty fucking perfect, I’m just bored.” Dakin gulps down his coffee in one vicious gulp. He holds out his empty cup. “This time without the cream.”   
  
It’s after this many years, ten long painful years. For some, the pain is faint in the back of one’s head like an oncoming migraine that never quite comes, it's sort of like memorizing all the poetry that they still don't understand. That’s how the pain is for Scripps. Had he thought to ask, Dakin would probably lie and say that there was no pain. So Scripps never asks.   
  
He pours Dakin another cup, without the cream, and slides it soundlessly across the table. “You could...you know, travel. Florence and Paris await you.  _Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find_.” It’s not as if Dakin doesn’t have the financial ability to do so if he felt so inclined. “If you’re so convinced that things are so mundane.”  
  
“Travelling?” For a moment, Dakin looks perplexed, as if the possibility has never before occurred to him. “It’s pointless to go it alone.”  
  
“Bring a girlfriend,” Scripps says. “I’m sure you’ve got dozens.” Maybe even hundreds. It’s silly, he thinks, Dakin is the last person the in world that has to worry about loneliness.  
  
“You don’t get it.”   
  
Of course he doesn’t get it. No one can get anything when it comes to Stuart Dakin. It’s something Scripps has come to get used to. Scripps throws up his hands in a sort of half-desperate gesture. “Explain it to me.”  
  
Now it’s Dakin’s turn to open and close his mouth several times before he finds the right words. A few cautious sips of coffee later, he still doesn’t find them. “...I can’t.” He says finally, and seems quite irritated for it. “I’ll sound like Posner.”  
  
Scripps doesn’t say anything. The last time they’d both heard from Posner, he was holding some obscure teaching position somewhere still in the Dales. Still in the doldrums. Neither of them remembered where, although neither of them would readily admit to it. The three of them had met Akhtar and Timms in some dingy old pub and traded stories like they were old men already.  
  
Posner had professed to being utterly miserable after a couple of pints, and Scripps had hauled him home. Dakin had driven back to the city, feeling a bit too thoughtful.  
  
“So even people like you can feel misery,” Scripps says. He doesn't mean it to be a question.  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dakin’s eyes flash, bleak and dark.   
  
“How the fuck should I know? You’re the one that’s supposed to be explaining it to me.”  
  
“I told you, I can’t.” Couldn’t Scripps even understand that? No, he couldn’t possibly. “And it isn’t misery, either.”  
  
Somewhere, there are bells. It’s from the church down the street, reminding Scripps to go to Confession when Dakin leaves. “I suppose not.”   
  
Dakin glances at his watch; it’s obnoxious and heavy, new. Very much Dakin, Scripps thinks. “I’ve got to run...Think on it?”  
  
“Yes, fine.” Scripps is suddenly immensely relieved that Dakin is pulling on his coat and finally leaving. “I’ll think on it.”  
  
  
  
Scripps does think on it. He thinks on it too much. He owns a small literary journal with a loyal circulation, and they publish twice a month, on the second and fourth Wednesdays. There’s a smattering of everything: poetry, short fiction, commentary about everyday life, even artworks, and sometimes politics would rear its ugly head if Scripps wasn’t careful about the editing. Sometimes, there would be interviews with up and coming authors or poets. Scripps likes his job; he doesn’t want Dakin’s nonsensical whims to destroy everything that he’s ever worked for.   
  
Whether he realizes it or not, Dakin is rather good at destroying things, and Scripps would really rather he didn’t.   
  
He makes some calls, and lands Dakin a temp job at an obscure paper. It’s a start.   
  
  
  
At first, Dakin is enthusiastic (perhaps even too much so) about his new job, until he realizes that the pay is absolute rubbish and even though his lawyer's fortune is quite incredible, it is probably better to move somewhere more sensible. Besides, living in a cheaper flat makes him forget about being a lawyer. There’s some halfhearted talk about Dakin becoming flatmates with Scripps, but it’s hard to say who was more horrified by the thought. It quickly disappears, and the next day, Dakin calls to say that he’s moved in with a girl he’s been seeing. Sophia? Sarah?   
  
Except then Dakin comes to realize that the hours of his new job are also absurd, and since he is new at the paper, they have him writing about sewer construction to clean up the water in west London. That’s just uninspiring. Don't all journalists need to be inspired? And besides, no one seems to care that he got top marks and read history at Oxford; he tells no one that he's also read law. There's some snide comments about Sheffield, although he pretends not to listen. Dakin is miserable. (Dull is an apt substitute.)   
  
“You should have told me,” Dakin says flatly, poking at his coffee cup. This Sunday, the coffee is spiced with a pinch of cinnamon, and it’s surprisingly not so bad.   
  
“In your own words, you wouldn’t have listened to me.”   
  
“I would have listened about that,” says Dakin, with a whine to his voice. “Tompkins says I write with too much flair. That there’s not enough facts -- for fuck’s sake, I write about bloody sewers. Why would I need flair for sewers?”   
  
“Marvelous,” Scripps says.   
  
“It’s not marvelous,” Dakin takes a vicious gulp and sets his cup down with a clink. “I’m about to get sacked.”   
  
It’s only been a month, and already Dakin’s getting sacked. Stuart Dakin, of all people. Had it not been for Scripps’ own recommendation, Scripps would have thought it was all very funny. “Dakin, it’s been a _month_.”  
  
“You have me working for a shit newspaper.” Dakin grumbles.  
  
“Oh, so it’s my fault.” Scripps rolls his eyes. “I’m sorry, was it supposed to be obvious? You’re reporting, of course you can’t write with flair. This isn’t Oxbridge exams, you know. Did they let you write like that while you were reading law?”   
  
“I hardly wrote,” Dakin shrugs. “It was just mostly...reading.”   
  
Maybe Dakin should have stuck to reading (His essays after all, had been a triumph -- the dullest of the lot.)   
  
.  
  
It is an unfortunate chain reaction: Dakin quits his job at Tompkin’s newspaper and Tompkin refuses to take calls from Scripps for two weeks. Scripps, in turn, pretends not to be home on Sunday. It just so happens that Lockwood is on leave from the army and Scripps offers him a place to stay for a couple of days. When Sunday rolls around, they’re watching the telly and Lockwood does not appear to have heard the knocking. The army probably has made him a bit deaf. Just this once, it’s not such a bad thing.   
  
“So...have you kept in touch with the others at all?” It’s the advert break, and Lockwood turns to look at him with some mild curiosity.   
  
“Some,” Scripps shrugs. “Dakin drops in on Sundays. I get postcards from Crowther. He’s in Berlin.”   
  
“Today is Sunday,” says Lockwood.   
  
“Yeah, he just knocked.”   
  
“You’re not going to let him in?”   
  
“We aren’t speaking,” Scripps retorts tersely. “Did you know he gave up being a tax lawyer? Said he wanted to be a journalist.”  
  
“...So he’s on your turf.” Lockwood lights a cigarette and goes over to an open window, right next to Scripps’ piano, it isn't a Steinway, but at least it plays and Scripps likes to think that it is a small fortune well spent. “Did you help him?”   
  
Scripps hates the answer he has to give. “Somehow, he convinced me.”   
  
“Yeah, he does that...” For a moment, Lockwood is amused, as he rolls his cigarette thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger. “What happened?”   
  
“Nothing happened, he got sacked.” Scripps sighs a long sigh. “Tompkin hates me.”   
  
“Who is Tompkin?”   
  
“I got Dakin a job at his paper.”   
  
“Oh.” Lockwood comes back to the couch because the programme has come back on. Scripps has already forgotten what it’s about.   
  
.  
  
Dakin does not like being jobless. Sylvia, the girl he’s moved in with, does not like his unemployment much either. He spends too much of his time watching the telly and smoking. Their flat stinks; she is halfway responsible.   
  
She hates the programmes that he likes to watch, and they spend a lot of time squabbling like an old married couple when they aren’t having sex. Sophia can’t fathom at all that he used to be a tax lawyer. He seems so without purpose -- don't lawyers always have purpose?   
  
Scripps is not talking to him, and Dakin ponders calling him to apologise properly. But pondering remains pondering, and he doesn’t. He does prowl newspapers for ads and renews his subscription to Scripps’ magazine ‘Brief Encounters’ as a gesture of good will. Scripps has become a thoughtful writer, not brash, just brilliant.   
  
Irwin would have been very proud of Scripps.   
  
It’s not because Dakin is sentimental or anything, because he really isn’t. But sometimes, he watches Tom Irwin’s historical documentaries on BBC because -- well, Dakin doesn’t exactly know why. The realisation is a bit frightening.   
  
Irwin doesn’t look like he’s changed much; maybe the glasses have become thicker and his skin has become greyer, although when Dakin closes his eyes, he still wonders what Irwin looks like sans lunettes. He’s half asleep that one night on the couch when Irwin mentions in passing that he has written a book on the many exploits of Ivan the Terrible.   
  
Dakin doesn’t think much of it, except when he passes by a bookshop three days later, he buys a copy on a whim. It’s a thick book (about a solid five hundred pages) and it’ll give him something to do.  
  
Before actually starting to read the book, Dakin skims Irwin’s slim biography on the inside flaps of the book jacket. It doesn’t mention much of anything, and it certainly does not mention Cutler’s Grammar School from ten years ago; only a brief sentence about how he’s taught history at one point. There isn’t even a picture. It does mention even more briefly another sentence that Irwin is married, and now Dakin spends too much of his free time wondering what Irwin’s wife is like.  
  
  
  
Scripps is having a shit rotten day at work. (That’s not even a properly constructed sentence. He probably needs another ten cups of coffee). It’s Tuesday and he needs it to be last week.   
  
When Dakin all but saunters in his office with a book under his arm, Scripps finds that his headache has suddenly multiplied tenfold. He should have never let on about where he worked. Then again, Dakin probably could have found out otherwise.   
  
“You look bloody awful.”   
  
“Obviously.” Scripps presses a hand to his throbbing temple. “I’m guessing you want something. You’ve got thirty seconds.”  
  
There is a loud thump, and the thick book that Dakin had been carrying lands a few precarious inches away from Scripps’ elbow. “It’s nice to see that you’ve been reading in your spare time.”   
  
“Scripps, just look.”   
  
Scripps looks. He doesn’t think much of it, or maybe he is just exhausted. Even if he draws from his abundant sense of Christian propriety, he has no time for Dakin, nor does he particular want to make time. “So Irwin wrote a book. Most historians write books, you know. Get out of my office.”  
  
  
  
Lockwood makes short work of packing. Although he prefers to be unruly, the army has taught him things. The importance of neatness is one of many. He slams his suitcase closed with a self-satisfying bang. Scripps is leaning against the doorway sipping coffee. Lockwood doesn’t like coffee, although he has grown rather fond of taking early morning trains.   
  
“It’s quieter; I don’t get quiet much,” Lockwood tells him.  
  
“One day, I’ll join the army,” Scripps says. "I've already got all the training I need."   
  
“You’re not saying that because of Dakin, are you?” Lockwood stands and straightens his coat. “I don’t think the army will suit you.”   
  
“Me neither,” Scripps sighs. “Apparently Irwin wrote a book.”   
  
“Irwin?”   
  
“From Cutler’s.”   
  
“ _That_  Irwin,” Lockwood frowns, as if trying to put a face to the name. Scripps has no idea whether he’s succeeded. “Alright, so he wrote a book. How is this relevant?”   
  
Scripps shrugs. “I don’t actually know...yet.” He turns his attention to his mug of coffee, then Lockwood, and then his mug again. “But Dakin has started reading the book and he stormed into my office telling me so. I’ve got no bloody clue what that means.”  
  
“It’s Dakin, I don’t think it has to mean anything.” Dakin obviously does not drop in on Lockwood on Sundays to waste time, or just because things are dull. Where has he heard that before?  
  
But in a way, Lockwood is probably right. “Are you sure you don’t want a lift? It’s no trouble.”  
  
“It’s fine. Cheers for letting me stay here, I appreciate it.” Lockwood’s hand is on the door. “See you around.”   
  
“Tell your mum I said hello.”   
  
“I’ll do that.” Lockwood claps him on the shoulder. “Good luck, Scrippsy.”   
  
He leaves; Scripps wonders what the luck was for.  
  
  
  
It’s Sunday, and it’s mostly ego, not so much desperation, that brings Dakin to stand outside Scripps’ flat for a good fifteen minutes before knocking. He waits for another five, and then turns to go.  
  
Then the door opens and Scripps just looks at him. “What do you want?”   
  
“I apologised to Tompkin,” Dakin says. In a way, he is also apologising vicariously to Scripps, because there is just something off about apologising to Scripps. “He and I had drinks and settled our differences. Amicably too, like good lads.”  
  
Scripps looks suspicious. “You had drinks with Tompkin.” 'What kind of drinks?' is also on the tip of his tongue, but it's one of those things that Scripps would rather not know, and so he doesn't ask.   
  
“What’s wrong with that? We’re on good terms now at least, and he offered me my job back. Starting Monday, I’ll be writing about sewers again.”  
  
“And you’re...going to take your old job back?”   
  
“No, I told him I quit -- for good this time.” When Scripps starts to frown, Dakin hurriedly adds, “but I bought him an extra two pints, I think he’s happy. No harm done this time, I promise.”   
  
Scripps is still unconvinced, but at least he opens his door and lets him in. He doesn’t quite forgive him yet. Coffee is second nature with Scripps, so Dakin follows him to the kitchen. “You’re insufferable.”  
  
“And yet you suffer me.” Dakin shrugs off his coat. “One wonders.”  
  
“You don’t leave me much of a choice.” Scripps sets down cups and crosses the kitchen to his fridge to search for something. “My landlord doesn’t like you. He says you creep around too much.”   
  
“Well, you know I don’t do that.”   
  
“I’m not so sure.” Scripps shuts his fridge and uncaps a bottle of chocolate syrup.   
  
“You’re putting...that in coffee?”   
  
“I’ve tried it, it’s not so bad. If you’d like I won’t put any in yours.”  
  
Dakin looks down at his hands. Scripps is a person that likes order; writing is about order, even the music sheets that sit on top of his piano in his sitting room is all about order. Why his coffee has to be any different...  
  
“About that book I showed you,” he says finally, because he can’t think of a cleverer way to start talking about it. It irks Dakin, really, that he can’t be clever. “The one that Irwin wrote.”   
  
Scripps is beginning to look wary again. “...The one about Ivan the Terrible? It probably reads like journalism.”   
  
“Says you.” Dakin shoots him a look. “It’s funny.”   
  
Scripps returns the coffee pot to its rightful place on his counter and walked the few steps back to the table. They never sit at the table, they just stand around. “I would quote you something, but it’s too early in the morning.”  
  
“I thought you went to Church on Sundays.”  
  
“I felt a cold coming.” For show, Scripps rubs the bridge of his nose. “Thought it might be best -- how was the book?”   
  
“Compelling,” Dakin smiles to himself. “It’s just compelling.” Except Dakin himself doesn’t quite know what he is talking about anymore. “The book jacket says that Irwin is married. I wonder about that.”  
  
Scripps makes a noncommittal sound and sips at his coffee. “It irritates you, doesn’t it?”   
  
Dakin’s face suddenly doesn’t know how to arrange itself. “What does?”   
  
“Nothing, never mind.” Scripps gestures at his mug. “Your coffee’ll go cold. Will you lend me the book?”   
  
“Yeah...I’ll bring it by next Sunday, remind me.”   
  
Now that Dakin is officially unemployed, Scripps is not looking forward to having Dakin around all day. As a result, he doesn’t say much for the next hour. Dakin gets tired of talking to air and leaves him alone.   
  
  
  
Dakin doesn’t forget, even if Scripps purposefully forgets to remind him. Irwin’s biography, _Ivan IV_  is waiting for on his desk when Scripps goes to the office on Thursday morning, along with a succinct note that Dakin expects his book to be returned in mint condition. Not that Dakin has ever returned any of Scripps' books that way in uni.   
  
Since there is not much of anything else to do, Scripps reads the biography. It does read like journalism and he’s vaguely reminded of Irwin’s lessons at Cutler’s. The book was published over a year and a half ago. He skims the meagre paragraph on the inside of the book jacket and decides that Dakin is right. It’s compelling. Dull titles can be misleading. Irwin has aptly proved that.  
  
He rings Dakin. A young woman’s voice answers, light and out of breath, and Scripps closes his eyes and thinks big tits and blonde -- perhaps chestnut curls, he’s not particularly good at imagining those things. Never has had much practice.   
  
There’s some muffled noise, and then Dakin is on the line. “Yeah?”   
  
“I read the book; you’re right.” He hates admitting that Dakin is right, because Scripps just knows that Dakin is hardly ever right about anything. “It is compelling. Can you come in?”   
  
“ _Now_?”   
  
“Yes, now.”   
  
When Dakin walks in his office a half hour later, Scripps has to wonder if he’s gone and interrupted Dakin in the passionate throes of sex -- the thought quickly comes and even more quickly goes. Dakin’s hair is not quite in place this morning and there’s a telling wrinkle in his collar.   
  
“What’s this about?”   
  
“I wanted to give your book back,” Scripps gestures.   
  
“This couldn’t have waited until Sunday?”   
  
Scripps gives him a searching look. “...You act like you sleep with it under your pillow, so you know, I thought you’d like it back early. Might have nightmares without it.”   
  
“You fucker.”   
  
Scripps snorts. “Did you say that about Tompkin, too?”   
  
“Obviously -- not in front of him.” Dakin is quick to add, “Just tell me what this is about. I’m busy.”  
  
“Are you?”   
  
Dakin does not say anything. Silence is an answer, sometimes, he remembers.   
  
A good while passes, and Scripps’ secretary pokes her head in to remind him that his appointment for ten-thirty has just arrived. “...Anyway, I have a job opening, I was wondering if you’d be interested.”   
  
“I thought you despised the idea of me and journalism,” says Dakin, although he is only a little surprised. Scripps is a rarely surprising person; it's all the God stuff getting to him. God doesn't want Man to be surprising. God is dull. 

“I may despise it, but I can take advantage of it. I rather think Jesus would be proud of me.”   
  
Only because Scripps knows that Dakin has to say something about Jesus, and now that he’s said it already, Dakin can't follow up without sounding crass. “You’re going to take advantage of me?” he says faintly; it’s not something that he can really fathom, especially coming from Scripps.   
  
Scripps’ face flickers, “I’m going to attempt to, yes. Mind you, it’s a temp position, but I think you’d enjoy it. Merthon usually handles correspondence, but he’s had an emergency. You were the first person that came to mind.”   
  
This doesn’t sound at all promising, but Dakin nods along anyway. “...Correspondence?”  
  
“Well, instead of just doing straight on interviews, it’s a more literary approach. Our correspondent exchanges letters with whichever artist or poet or novelist we’re doing a piece on, just for a week or two. Of course there’s a traditional sit-down interview, but it’s not going to be a big part of the process. More of a catchup. You know, what's trendy in offices now. I’ve found that letters are more personal.” 'Intimate', is the word that Scripps wants to use, but suggesting that to Dakin is not a good idea, especially when he's talking about Irwin.   
  
Hector comes to mind, although Dakin doesn’t think Scripps really notices. Or perhaps Scripps really is that subtle. “As I have no previous background in journalism, it’s a bit worrying that you’d think of me.”   
  
“Is it?” Scripps smiles at him, showing teeth -- now, that is really rather worrying. “I felt like doing a piece on Tom Irwin. His _Ivan IV_ is compelling. The title doesn't do it justice. You could open with that.” He scribbles some information on a scrap of clean paper and folds it neatly into the book. “Think about it.”   
  
  
  
_Think about it._  
  
Dakin does think about it, while he thumbs through Irwin’s  **Ivan IV**  for the twentieth time. It isn’t poetic, because Irwin is no poet, but Dakin clearly remembers the good bits that are well worth quoting. He thinks about it while he watches Sylvia dry off after a shower wearing nothing but a towel. She’s probably had more than her fair share of boyfriends, too, but she’s never mentioned them. For Dakin’s part, he never mentions his past conquests, or the few times in his third year at Oxford, where he’d really wondered if he really was that way inclined.   
  
He’s long since decided that he isn’t, but Irwin has a way about him, a way that throws everything that Dakin has ever believed in (which is admittedly not very much) out of perspective. That’s what irks him, because there is nothing wrong with Dakin’s perspectives until Irwin happens along. Irwin’s done that twice already. And he will undoubtedly manage a third time, if Dakin takes Scripps’ job offer.   
  
“You’re quiet,” Sylvia says.   
  
Dakin hastily puts  **Ivan IV**  aside (not under his pillow -- definitely not), and blinks at her. “What?”   
  
“I said, you’re quiet. Are you feeling all right?”   
  
“Fine.” Dakin turns to look at her, manages a smile, although it always comes out as a smirk.  
  
She’s mostly convinced, so she leans over and kisses him. He doesn’t so much like kissing, but she does, and he sees no point to dispute that. Dakin breaks away briefly to say, “Scripps offered me a temp job at his magazine.”   
  
Sylvia doesn’t know much about Scripps; she thinks that Scripps is Dakin’s only friend and Dakin doesn’t like to concede that she might be right.   
  
“That’s good.” She says, “You’re going to take it, aren’t you?”   
  
Dakin shrugs.   
  
“ _Stuart_.”   
  
Sometimes, Dakin forgets he has to answer to Stuart; it’s an altogether bloody awful name and he hates it. No one has ever endeared Stuart to him. There are certainly those who valiantly try, but none successful.   
  
“There has to be some reason you don’t want the job,” Sylvia decides as she touches his arm.   
  
“I never said I didn’t want it,” says Dakin, noting that she has probably bought some new fragrance for her hair, since it is a scent that he doesn’t recognize. And he likes to know these things. “I’m still thinking about it.” Somewhere along the lines, he’s really grown too fond of thinking. That’s something that comes with age, maybe.   
  
  
  
“...What?”   
  
It’s late; Sylvia is asleep, and Dakin makes the mistake of ringing Scripps. “It’s me.”  
  
There’s some rustling, and Dakin thinks he hears a light click on somewhere on the other end. “Dakin? It’s after midnight.”   
  
Dakin says, “I’m done thinking about it.”   
  
“It’s after midnight,” Scripps says again and hangs up.    
  
Dakin puts  _Ivan IV_ back on the bookshelf and goes to bed.   
  
  
  
Scripps has neat handwriting; he always did, does still, and probably always will. His hand is too neat and is nothing like Irwin's, if that is meant to say anything about him at all. The scrap of paper has three things on it: the BBC’s address at Wood Lane, which Dakin already knows, an address that might be Irwin’s flat, and a phone number.   
  
Dakin tries dialling it twice, and hangs up before it begins to ring. Cowardice, he decides, is also something that comes with age. Maybe he understands now.   
  
  
  
_“Is that a euphemism? Saying a drink when you actually mean something else?”_  
  
That wasn’t the only meaningful conversation that he and Irwin had ever had, but it was the one that had mattered...and so the only one that Dakin remembers. Because it was the only one that hadn’t been in the subjunctive...or something.   
  
He waits a few hours and picks up the phone again. It is nearing six o’ clock and he might be interrupting Irwin’s dinner. Takeaway food, gourmet meals for one, or a lonely pizza? None of those things, he has a wife now, she probably is a terrific cook. An honest man always knows what he is lacking.   
  
One ring, two rings, four rings, five --  
  
“Hello?”   
  
Irwin’s voice. It’s changed, but then it’s stayed wholly the same. Suddenly, Dakin can’t quite talk around the knot that has formed in his throat.   
  
“May I speak to a Tom Irwin, please?” That doesn’t sound like anything that Dakin would have said. He already knows that it’s Irwin there on the other end, but he just...  
  
\-- “This is Tom Irwin speaking, who's there, please?”   
  
Dakin promptly hangs up the phone.  
  
  
  
It’s stupid to wonder these things, but having too much free time on his hands makes Dakin wonder if Irwin has children. He would have had to have sex before he's had children. It irks him how a woman has had the opportunity to touch Irwin before he did, but it is just a thought...a fleetingly inappropriate thought.  
  
Although, why would it be inappropriate? He is no longer a sixth former trying to con his former teacher into having a drink with him out of gratitude. He's just...an interested bloke.

Actually, that makes it worse. 

 

Scripps still retains the habit of writing out every draft by hand. Dakin hasn’t yet figured out if the habit is due to stubbornness or stupidity, except he isn’t exactly in the mood or the position at the moment to judge anyone for their alleged stupidity.   
  
There are notes scattered about his desk, and Dakin picks up a page on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He skims it and sets it down. “Coleridge?” Not a bad poet, just different. Someone that Hector has never had them read.  
  
Scripps doesn’t look up. “How was Irwin?”   
  
“I don’t know.”   
  
“You...don’t know?” Scripps puts down his pencil; it needs sharpening. “Enlighten me.”  
  
Dakin shrugs. “I haven’t called him yet.”   
  
There’s only the faint tap-tapping of Scripps’ pen to fill the odd silence that settled between them. Then Scripps just heaves a long-suffering sigh and reaches for the phone.  
  
“What are you doing?”   
  
Scripps largely ignores him as he dials. “--Yes, Tom Irwin please.”   
  
“Scripps, hang up the phone.” The knot in Dakin’s throat is back.   
  
“Mr. Irwin, this is Donald Scripps from the ‘Brief Encounter’ magazine -- yes, the same Donald Scripps, sir. Thank you. I guess I manage...how are you?”   
  
“Scripps --”   
  
Scripps’ only response is to flick his pen at him and his aim is surprisingly accurate. Dakin barely manages to dodge.   
  
“Saturday night sounds fine, around eight? Thank you, sir. I’ll let him know. Yes, of course...good-bye.” He puts the phone down and gives Dakin the exasperated look that Dakin knows he completely deserves.   
  
“This Saturday, eight, his flat. No excuses, or else I will sack you.” And before Dakin can think of something witty (maybe something along the lines of a ‘drink’), Scripps adds, “It’s nothing that a drink can fix, either.”   
  
  
  
Dakin goes home and thinks about losing the scrap of paper, but he only thinks about it. Scripps is probably serious about sacking him.  
  
Saturday night is when he and Sylvia usually go out somewhere, but this Saturday night, Dakin begs off on that and drives to Irwin’s flat after putting on an unassuming suit and tie. It is not a long drive; he actually arrives ten minutes early and spends those ten minutes sucking on a cigarette, trying to be thoughtful. Irwin isn’t someone that he thinks about often – at least, not really. Or maybe Dakin doesn’t realize that he thinks about him because Irwin’s always kind of been there.   
  
When his watch slowly crawls to eight, Dakin gets out of his car and goes to stand in front of Irwin’s flat. The bell looks broken, so he knocks instead.  
  
  
  
Irwin is the one that opens the door, not his wife, not his sons or daughters if he has any. He leans heavily on a cane, and he wears a comfortable-looking jumper appropos for the weather; Dakin doesn’t think he’s ever seen Irwin in casual attire, save for that memorable last day where he'd shown up without a tie. And it’s only the telly that makes his skin look gray; he mostly just looks pale. But there is nothing weak about him. Nothing.  
  
For a moment, Irwin does not appear to recognize him. His eyes are brilliantly blue.  
  
“... _Dakin_?”   
  
“Hello, sir.” Dakin has a few witty lines tucked away, but right now, his tongue feels much too thick to do any of them justice. “Scripps sent me, from the magazine.”   
  
“Oh.” Irwin touches a hand to his glasses. “This is a surprise, I thought you settled on law.”  
  
“Yeah, me too,” Dakin says, and promptly kicks himself again. “May I come in?” Ten years ago, he wouldn’t have asked. How times have changed. He tricks himself into thinking the flicker in Irwin’s eyes mean agreement.   
  
“Please,” Irwin nods, and steps aside for him.  
  
Dakin is not going to lie – in the privacy of his own mind, he is at least afforded that particular privilege – but Irwin’s flat seems oddly empty for a man with a family. There are no lights on, and Irwin only reaches for a switch when he has closed the door.  
  
The light is not bright, but it’s light enough. The whole flat seems cramped, somehow, and Irwin waves him into the sitting room. The furniture is old, the colours carefully austere.   
  
“Something to drink? I can make some tea.”   
  
Dakin doesn’t really want tea, but he nods anyway because he wants a chance to see Irwin’s kitchen. It’s small, and tidy enough to make Dakin wonder if it’s ever been used. There are no dishes in the sink, and nothing seems out of place.   
  
“Do you...want some help?”   
  
Irwin shakes his head. “I’ve always managed.”  
  
First person singular; Dakin thinks that ‘we’ would have been more apt. But then, Irwin has always been the type of person to always trivialize things, so Dakin doesn’t know anymore.   
  
Irwin’s tea turns out to be both sweet and bitter, as if it can’t quite make up its mind what to be. It’s almost as bad as Scripps’ Sunday coffee.  
  
There is a long silence, and Dakin says, “You...erm, you look like you’re doing well.”  
  
Irwin graces him with a strange half-smile. “So it would seem.” He takes a sip of his own tea and sets it back down. “Most of my interviews are usually conducted in the sitting room. More comfortable.”   
  
For some odd indiscernible reason, Irwin wants him comfortable. Instead of feeling pleased as he really should, the knot in Dakin’s throat just grows tighter. “I’m all right here.” His mouth suddenly itches for a cigarette. He wonders if Irwin still smokes. If his wife approves.  
  
Irwin shrugs; for him, the gesture is unexpectedly crass. “Have a seat, then.”  
  
Dakin does, and even though he doesn’t care much for Irwin’s tea, he takes another sip anyway.   
  
“This is your first interview?”  
  
“First time conducting one, yeah.”  
  
Irwin looks thoughtful as he touches his lips to the rim of his cup. “Is it a coincidence?”   
  
No, not a coincidence. Dakin likes to think himself too jaded for coincidences. Things happen; they certainly do not need to happen for some strange higher purpose. “I don’t like to think so.”   
  
“Why?”   
  
Because it is subjunctive. Dakin will probably grow fond of the subjunctive once he admits to himself that he actually needs to; when he finally grows old. But not yet. “I wish I knew. Why are you the one asking me questions?”  
  
Irwin’s lips flicker -- upwards into a smirk? “Then you ask me something.”   
  
That much hasn’t changed; Irwin’s mastery of bold, biting words hasn’t left him. Scripps had given him a list of generic questions, dull questions, but he thinks the list will serve better use if it stays in his pocket. “Why aren’t you in a nicer flat?” It’s the first thing that comes to mind, and relatively relevant. After all, Irwin is a successful television historian, published novelist; this cramped flat seems ill-suited.   
  
Irwin frowns, as if he doesn’t understand the question.   
  
Dakin pushes forward. “You can, can’t you? Afford something nicer.”  
  
“I like it here,” Irwin says, so quickly that Dakin is sure that he is lying. “It isn’t too far from the station. Convenient. Wouldn't you believe, quiet at night, thanks to the double glazing.”   
  
“You don’t strike me as the type that likes convenience,” Dakin says, mostly without thinking.  
  
“If I recall, I didn’t strike you as much of anything.”   
  
That is...almost true, but Dakin quickly turns away. “Let’s talk about something else.” Somehow it seems odd, that Irwin holds something over him now, though he has no idea what ‘it’ might be at all. Perhaps age. Perhaps something even sillier. “I read Ivan IV.”   
  
“That’s the one you read?” Irwin blinks.  
  
“There were others?”   
  
“Not many others; writing doesn’t really suit me. I really prefer working on television.” Irwin leans back in his chair.   
  
Dakin can’t exactly help himself. “Was Poland lucky?”   
  
“I didn’t write a book on Poland,” Irwin says. There’s something in his voice...maybe wistfulness. Or maybe it is just Dakin being hopeful.  
  
“Oh.” There’s plenty of room for him to fit a snide comment in there somewhere, but still he doesn’t do it. Dakin wonders why. “Then what did you write?” For the first time, he notices a telling gold band on Irwin’s ring finger. Subtle, cheap.  
  
“Just Ivan IV, and Anne Boleyn, and...oh, I don’t remember anymore. King George III, Catherine Parr. I’d have to look. Misunderstood heroes of centuries past.”   
  
“That’s like you,” Dakin says. But then it isn't, because none of these people are very much off the beaten track, Catherine Parr excepted. Or maybe it is because that it is exhausting to be so unpredictable all the time. He could certainly ask a question about that, but he doesn't.  
  
Irwin wears a careful half-smile. “You think?”   
  
“Yeah, I think.” Dakin watches Irwin’s fingers splay out on the table, although he doesn’t really know all that much; at least he hides it well. “How’s Mrs. Irwin?” It comes out sounding mostly natural and Dakin is pleased. Of course he has his private doubts of how natural a woman would be in the position of Irwin’s wife.   
  
Irwin refills both of their cups, “There’s no Mrs. Irwin,” he says blandly.  
  
If that is meant to be a lie, it’s a bad one. Dakin opens his mouth and closes it. That is about the last thing he’d ever expected to come from Irwin. But then again, Irwin does have a way about him. It seems inappropriate to pursue the non-subject any further, so he fishes for a cigarette and lights it.   
  
He is only half expecting Irwin to stop him, but Irwin does not. Dakin inhales deeply and blows smoke towards the ceiling. The lighting is too dark in here, he thinks. The lighbulbs need changing. After a moment, he passes the cigarette wordlessly across the table, and their fingers brush. Both of them pretend not to notice.  
  
Dakin says, “Scripps wants to run the piece on you in March.” It is January now, late January. “You and I have to write to each other.”  
  
“I’m aware.”   
  
Dakin is a bit rubbish at letters, only because he hasn’t ever had the occasion to write them. Irwin will probably grade his letters, call them dull, mark them up with an obnoxious red scrawl; what were his words exactly? --  _Lucid, and to a point compelling, but if you reached a conclusion it escaped me._  
  
In the end, Dakin doesn’t think anything has changed.  
  
  
  
For his part, Tom Irwin is of the opinion that Dakin has completely changed. He still lives and breathes on his own ego, probably, but everything else is different. Tonight, Irwin has already made several grave mistakes, but he doesn’t know what it means that Dakin refuses to acknowledge them and spin them to his own advantage.  
  
In fact, the boy -- man -- across from him easily wears Dakin’s face, but everything about him is so different that Irwin scarcely recognizes him. For one, he thinks that Dakin ought to have more to say.   
  
“Were you unhappy?” Irwin says. “Is that why?”   
  
“Of course I was happy, the money was incredible, the girls lined up around the corner,” Dakin smirks, but Irwin thinks the expression suddenly looks strange on him, not quite at home. “There wasn't anything to be unhappy about. You were the one that told me I’d be happy anywhere...I bet you don’t remember.”   
  
Wasn't. Not is or isn't. It doesn’t really have to mean anything, just an honest slip of the tongue. And yet here he is, again. “Are you trying to be a poet?” Dakin’s last remark just hangs there; Irwin can’t bring himself to address it. Besides, he’s forgotten a lot of things, thanks to the accident and then some, there’s no harm to add that particular bit to the list.  
  
“Oh, God no – Scripps is, though.” Dakin stretches his arms languidly over his head. “I think Hector would have been proud of him.”   
  
Again, Irwin wonders what that means. He rubs the bridge of his nose. “Is this about Hector, then?”   
  
Dakin just laughs at him, “You really do make a good journalist.”  
  
Irwin sips tea and looks at him. “Really?”  
  
As an answer, Dakin gets up and walks a slow reverent circle around Irwin’s kitchen. He comes to a stop directly behind Irwin’s chair and Irwin does not move. He can’t move.  
  
“Journalists ask questions,” says Dakin. “Everything you say seems to end in a question.”  
  
“I think that has more to do with my being a historian...or perhaps not.” Irwin finally tips his head back to find Dakin staring down at him. “I would have thought you’d be a person that likes questions.”  
  
“What gave you that idea? That’s a question.”   
  
The cigarette, almost gone, makes its way back to Dakin. Irwin doesn’t look at him again. He doesn’t really have an answer, so he only shrugs. “You like knowing things.” That might be why he is here.  
  
“Then, yeah, I like answers. Answers don’t have anything to do with questions.”   
  
“Who taught you that?” Irwin bites his tongue. He doesn’t mean for the words to slip so easily.  
  
Dakin’s lips twist into an odd knowing smile; he looks pleased with himself, too pleased. “No one. But see –” His hands have settled on the back of Irwin’s chair, still not quite touching him. The choice is ultimately still Irwin’s to make, Dakin makes that much obvious. “ – apparently you’re fond of questions and I like answers. It’s interesting.”   
  
“Is it?”   
  
“Immensely so.” Dakin peers at him for a moment longer and finally straightens up. “You were always interesting. I bet you can’t stand to be dull.” He makes a slow sojourn back to the other side of the table and picks up his cup, although it is already empty.  
  
“I am dull,” says Irwin, feeling the strangest twinge of desperation crawl its way up his spine.   
  
And then Dakin smiles; it’s a misleading smile, only because Irwin hasn’t the slightest idea of what it might mean. Law must have taught him that. There is no other explanation.  
  
“Or you try to be. I don’t believe that.”   
  
“Of course you don’t,” Irwin shrugs. It is an inevitability, and he is not going to dwell on it. “You hardly ever believe anything I tell you.”  
  
“And what does that say about me, I wonder?” Dakin’s mouth suddenly looks so tempting. “ _Stay but a little, I will come again_. That's Shakespeare, if you remember. Same time next week?”  
  
Bold boy, Irwin thinks as his own lips threaten to twitch in eager agreement. Perhaps he has learned a few things after all.  
  
.  
  
Scripps is amused.  
  
“So you’re saying, in not so many words: you’re still a flirt, and he’s still interesting. What else is new?”   
  
Dakin weighs his glass in his hand, as if gauging the distance between them -- the table, several entrees that neither of them have touched, but everything looks delectable. Scripps is wearing a white shirt. “It sounded much more eloquent than that in my head.”   
  
“Do you ever sound any way else?”  
  
“D’you know what I really hate?”   
  
Scripps raises a mildly bemused eyebrow. “Several things come to mind, knowing you.” He breaks off abruptly. “Actually, I don’t quite feel like I know you.” Not much, not anymore, if ever.   
  
“I hate journalists,” Dakins says, finally. “There’s something about you people.”   
  
“Us...people?” Now Scripps is really amused. “What are we, a whole different species?”  
  
“You might as well be.” For now, Dakin’s attention is mostly on his wine. The wine is a bit awful, but he can blame that on Scripps. “You people with all your questions. At least I got myself invited back.”   
  
“You mean you invited yourself back,” Scripps corrects him, out of habit. Journalism is an art, but there is no denying fundamental truths. Dakin’s delusion is one of them.   
  
Dakin shrugs. “Wasn't aware there was a difference. By the way, this wine is shit.”  
  
“I don’t exactly drink.” Scripps waves that away and says, “You don’t like journalists, and yet you’re now aspiring to be one.”  
  
Dakin holds up one finger. “For one, the questions.” He raises a mildly perplexed brow of his own and looks almost threatening. “Don’t you ever get tired of asking questions? Why not just look for answers elsewhere?”   
  
“Yeah? Like where?” Scripps samples his wine; he doesn’t exactly drink and now he’s reminded exactly why. Not everyone has a penchant for wine.   
  
“I don’t know,” Dakin shrugs. “You ask so many questions, aren’t you even interested in the answers anymore?”  
  
Irwin has always made Dakin strange, and this time was not going to be an exception. Scripps doesn’t understand either of them, and he’s starting to think that he may not want to; curiosity is not so insatiable a beast, after all. “...Was he surprised to see you?”  
  
“I think he was,” Dakin gestures at him. “That was your plan, wasn’t it?”   
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
  
Scripps realizes that Dakin has drained his wine; for one with endless complaints, he is still a puzzle. A thoroughly irritating puzzle that Scripps really wants to smash sometimes, so that no one else can manage to put him together. Although, Scripps likes to think that he knows Dakin better than everyone else -- Irwin’s the one that has come the closest to putting him together, if Dakin is meant to be put together in any sense at all.  
  
He looks at Dakin’s fingers splayed out casually atop the white tablecloth. “Yeah, you do. It never works, you know; when you try to lie to me.”  
  
It’s not as if Scripps really tries. If anything, journalism has only taught him a few great spins and a few lesser lies, but he stays quiet and after a while, Dakin continues. “This...I think I have a theory.” Dakin’s smirk is all knowing, as if his “theory” is ultimately not meant to be just a common hypothetical, but some universally acknowledged truth. The word seems cheap somehow because Scripps no longer professes to know what it actually means.   
  
“What?” Dakin is infinitely exhausting. That part is enough easy to understand.  
  
“You’re afraid of the answers.” Smirks have always suited Dakin, and the incorrigible ones especially so. “So you think your questions have to matter, they have to matter so much. When it comes right down to it, the answers themselves, they don’t really matter at all. The answer is only what the questioner wants them to be.”   
  
“ _That’s_  your theory?” This is risky ground; Scripps will have to tread softly.  
  
“Granted, it’s not so brilliant yet,” Dakin says thoughtfully. “Only half polished.”  
  
Scripps decides that Dakin is having this conversation with the wrong person. “You should write that in a letter.”   
  
“I’m rubbish at letters.” Dakin waves over a waiter and proceeds to shoot out a name of what Scripps gathers to be a very expensive wine. Scripps just looks at him and Dakin shrugs. “I think this is occasion enough for a toast.” Fresh glasses with fresh wine arrive a minute later and it's subtle and sweet. Not like the shit wine that Scripps had originally ordered. Dakin certainly has the means to be a wine connoisseur if he wants to.   
  
There are things in the world that even a zealous journalist with all his well-placed questions should never understand. Scripps is all right with that. He only shrugs. “If you’re paying.”   
  
.  
  
The letter comes on a Thursday, sitting neatly on top of Irwin’s desk, right next to his morning cup of tea as if it has always belonged there. Somehow, he doesn’t expect it; it seemed all too subtle for someone like Dakin. But the boy Dakin that Irwin thinks he knows is ten years long gone. If he hasn’t learned anything at Cutler’s, surely Oxford has taught him a few useful tricks.  
  
Dakin has always liked tricks.   
  
Teaching, too, seemed a thing long past. Irwin thinks that he might have stuck with it, if there hadn’t been Cutler’s, or Hector, or Dakin. If it had been anywhere, anyone else, perhaps the idyll of a contented life wouldn’t have so hasty to flee from him. Except Irwin is not so much a romantic as he is a pragmatist.   
  
Nowadays, Irwin is used to walking with a cane. The alternative is a wheelchair and that makes him feel like an invalid when he really isn’t supposed to be one. Sometimes, he still gets strange looks because no part of him looks like an old man, except for his eyes if he ever lets anyone get close enough to look.  
  
He remembers a classroom, warm afternoon sunlight, the smell of stale chalk, a foolish promise for a drink, except it’s not supposed to be a drink. Only a euphemism. Irwin hates that he also remembers a few other things, things like how his throat had closed up and how scared shitless he had been.   
  
_Actually, it would please Hector...your being scared shitless; that’s another gerund.  
_  
Last Saturday hadn’t been anything like that, because it has been ten years and Irwin has quietly slipped halfway into his thirties without having much of anything to show for it. Sure, there’s television, but that feels cheap. Dakin, though, has come out wearing the Oxford shine and Irwin is almost envious of him. Almost, because Dakin's life tries too hard to be complicated, and Irwin is old enough now, that all the complexities make his head hurt.  
  
There is a knock on his door, and a woman pokes her head in. “Tom, have you got a minute?”  
  
Irwin hurriedly tosses the unopened envelope in a drawer, fully intending to forget it for the rest of the day.  
  
“Of course, come in.”   
  
.  
  
Once in a while, it crosses his mind, but things like late filming segments, misplaced notes, and assistants that don’t know what they’re doing keep him from wondering too much.   
  
Irwin opens the letter that night, after he’s thrown in tired vegetables and scraps of beef from his fridge for a stew. It is probably not going to taste very good. Now that he is by himself again, learning to cook would probably be a useful hobby, except he can’t seem to find the time. Irwin feels that it is important to note that he is only reading the letter out of obligation to Scripps, and not curiosity. He doesn’t have reason to be curious about Dakin.   
  
Even more importantly, Irwin isn’t at all disappointed when the letter barely reaches a page.   
  
Dakin’s handwriting too has changed. His letters have matured into something bold and smug. Smugness does not equate to maturity, but Irwin can see how Dakin gets confused. There was a time when Dakin’s hand so sharply resembled Irwin’s own crap handwriting, but he has grown out of it. Rightly so.  
  
For the most part, Dakin has written him a surprisingly formal letter, detailing some logistics of his project and what he hopes to accomplish by the time March rolls around. Dakin has bought all of Irwin’s books and right now, he’s making his way through Anne Boleyn. Irwin’s titles are all abysmally ordinary. For someone brimming over the edge with rebellious creativity, couldn’t Irwin have come up with something better? It’s disappointing, really.  
  
Dakin goes on to ask him how work is going for him at the station, and perhaps, if he might come in to visit one day under the guise of a journalist. If there are any other guises that Dakin can take on, Irwin would rather not think about it. In conclusion, he asks that Irwin please take heart and not mark up this letter in red ink, it’s probably a bad habit that has yet to leave him.  
  
Irwin doesn’t think there are any other guises, and he wishes that Dakin would grow out of all other things, before he snorts quietly to himself and goes to his study for a fresh piece of paper, and a red pen.   
  
.  
  
“That’s not what I meant,” Dakin says flatly. It is Saturday night again, eight exactly, and he has Irwin’s letter in hand.   
  
Irwin leans against his door in favour of his cane and blinks at him. “I don’t know what you mean.” His leg is hurting, and he is rather exhausted all over even though it is Saturday night and he hasn’t done much all day. At any rate, Irwin isn’t about to let on as Dakin prowls through his doorway without further invitation.   
  
“I think you do.” Dakin slips off his shoes. “You always do.”   
  
“I’m not your teacher anymore,” Irwin tells him dryly, closing the door, making a visible effort not to rely too much on his cane. “I’m entitled to be an idiot sometimes.” After a moment, he adds, “You’re the one that told me I wasn’t very bright.”   
  
Dakin looks surprised, but only for a second, as his mouth hurries to twist into a smirk, as if he knew all along. “You remember that.” It isn’t a question.   
  
“How could I not?”   
  
“I like to think that I’ve said much more memorable things for you to remember,” Dakin says. “Anyway, you didn’t need to write me an entire letter in red ink.”   
  
Irwin very nearly blanches, but keeps his expression neutral enough. “So maybe you’re not as bright as you think. I didn’t mean it to be anything, just a fitting homage to your grammar school days.” Turning, he leads the way into the kitchen. The remnants of Thursday’s stew is still on the stove, being reheated for the third time. He had meant to eat earlier.   
  
“Is that your dinner?” Dakin says, because he’s opened and closed his mouth several times already.   
  
“I meant to eat earlier.” Irwin turns off the stove, but then he remembers that he has to make tea, so he turns the stove back on after fetching the kettle.   
  
Dakin makes a face. “And that’s what you’re eating.”   
  
“Remind me not to offer you any.” Irwin suddenly feels mostly naked in his own kitchen. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant feeling.   
  
“I also hate your tea,” Dakin says. His gaze is somewhere, intense, and Irwin looks down. He hastily stuffs his hand into his pocket. “You’re not very good at looking after yourself, are you?”   
  
An awkward beat passes between them, and Irwin watches Dakin light up a cigarette. He really should stop him, as Irwin himself tries not to smoke inside his flat, but since when does Dakin ever listen? “That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” he says faintly.  
  
“I’m disappointed in you, thought you’d have a better gobbet than that.” Dakin exhales, and the thin film of smoke makes his face just slightly blurry.  
  
That’s twice Dakin has said that, or he wrote it once and said it once. Not that it would make any difference, really. Perhaps it is inevitable; Dakin has led the life that Irwin has always wanted for himself, Oxford, outgoing, straight...they’re still not bad things to be.   
  
“I’m not anything like Hector.” It is not an answer, but something that Irwin feels needs to be said. To save himself from further embarrassment, he dips a spoon into his now lukewarm stew. It’s stale, tasteless, horrible.  
  
“I never said you were. You aren’t anything like him,” Dakin says, after a moment, sounding tremendously sincere. He is standing close enough to put his hand on Irwin’s shoulder. But he does not, although his fingers do seem like they want to creep close.   
  
  
  
Dakin is good about doing things without invitation, and Irwin’s not so good at issuing invitations, so it all works out in the end. Irwin is being much too brave about his horrible dinner, but he doesn’t think it would be wise to pursue that subject further. When the kettle whistles, Irwin drops his spoon, but Dakin stops him with a raised hand. “I’ll get it.”   
  
Irwin looks like he desperately wants to protest, but he stays silent. Everything about Irwin seems a bit desperate now, but that doesn’t make him any less fascinating. Dakin gets cups from the pantry -- he remembers where they were from last Saturday, and pours tea for both of them.   
  
Irwin says, “You hate my tea.”   
  
“But you’ve already put the kettle on, it’s only polite. Good form,” Dakin tells him reasonably.   
  
It’s probably Dakin’s own fault that Irwin doesn’t look convinced. Even so, Irwin does not say anything and after a too long moment, Dakin is forced to continue with: “Why do you always think that? That you’re like Hector. He’s dead, and I don’t think anyone would ever be like him again.” He isn’t saying it to be cruel.   
  
Irwin reaches for one of the cups. “We’ve had this conversation before, I’ve told you why.”   
  
“Well, it’s obvious that neither of us have learned anything from that conversation, so we might as well have it again.” Irwin is close, close enough that Dakin might reach out and touch him...surely Irwin will let him.  
  
“None of that matters now.” Irwin puts both of his hands on the table and the ring glints pointedly at Dakin. Dakin wants to roll his eyes, but Irwin’s next comment stops him. “Did Scripps ever tell you that you were terrible with interviews?”   
  
The subject shift is unexpected, but welcome. “He hasn’t, no.” Dakin puts his cup down and raises the cigarette to his lips instead. “You were always better about telling me things.” Actually, that is putting it quite nicely. “I suppose that you’ve done scores.”   
  
“Of interviews?” The worried wrinkles on Irwin’s forehead have smoothed out and suddenly, he looks more relaxed. This topic is one that he knows well and it isn’t dangerous at all. “Not quite scores, but enough.”   
  
That sentence doesn’t exactly feel complete, but Dakin can’t think of a subtle way to press forward. He does lean his elbows forwards on the table and he thinks that Irwin’s eyes are blindingly honest. Perhaps that is why he has never learned to lie properly. He can very well say things, and spin facts to suit his outrageous angles, but Dakin thinks that Irwin cannot lie. That bit about getting into Corpus -- or Jesus, whatever, that was a fluke. Irwin might have gotten away with it if Dakin hadn't been so suspicious in the first place.   
  
He imagines tucking his fingers gently under Irwin’s chin, and asking him in a soft whisper to be honest. Irwin is so afraid of honesty. Lying works, certainly; they’ve proved that again and again, but lying probably shouldn’t work for Irwin.   
  
“To be honest, I would have thought you’d grow out of it,” Irwin finally speaks, and his voice ghosts warmly over Dakin’s skin and makes him shiver.   
  
“You think too much of me,” Dakin says, and straightens up again and backs away.  
  
Irwin blinks. “Ten years ago a boy might have told me that I didn’t think enough of him.” His lips twitch into a vaguely pleased smile.  
  
Dakin’s face suddenly feels too warm. Quickly, he looks away. “Contrary to popular belief, they do teach you some useful things at Oxford.”   
  
“Do they?”   
  
“...Just sometimes. Like functional alcoholism.”  
  
It is not so much an impossibility now, for Dakin to walk to Irwin’s chair and kiss him. In fact, it is an inevitability. An inevitability that is only seconds and steps away. He takes one step, and then another. Irwin doesn’t move and his eyes don’t move away.   
  
  
  
Irwin thinks that the bold brash boy from ten years ago might have laughed at him and say something stupid, like ‘it’s about fucking time,’ because it has been ten years and Irwin certainly has all the mistakes to show for it, starting with the ring he refuses to take off and ending with the horrible stew he’s trying to eat for dinner.  
  
Except Dakin doesn’t say anything. Irwin thinks he remembers being barely conscious in a white hospital room on a Sunday wondering whether to sneak out to the nearest pub just for symbolism’s sake.  
  
Now, here they are. Inches and seconds away. It isn’t the first time that Irwin has kissed another man, but he knows that kissing Dakin will be something entirely different. Dakin reaches out a hand and touches the corner of his mouth.  
  
“Take off your glasses.”   
  
Irwin swallows. “Not this time.” His throat is so dry he can barely form the words. His mind is spinning, which is excuse enough for his slip of tongue. ‘Not this time’ means that there will be next time.   
  
Dakin’s mobile is ringing in his pocket. Dakin curses, and Irwin swallows again. He isn’t sure how he feels about the interruption at all, but somehow, the words “Answer it,” slip too easily from his mouth.   
  
“I don’t have to,” Dakin says as the mobile keeps ringing. “I don’t want to.”   
  
“Just answer it, it might be important.”   
  
Dakin heaves a heavy sigh and does. “Yeah?”   
  
Irwin takes this as an opportunity to look away. There’s frantic babble coming from the other end of the line, and Irwin knows that if he tries, he could probably make out some words. He doesn’t try.   
  
“Now?” Dakin bites down on his lip, “I told you, I’m working. So go into a pub and sit there for a while...I’ll ring you when I’m done.” He slaps the mobile closed with a decisive click. He seems uncertain now, very much like a boy again, eyes looking everywhere but Irwin. Irwin finally reaches out and catches Dakin’s wrist, lets go when Dakin finally looks at him.   
  
“Who is it?”   
  
“My girlfriend,” Dakin says, mouth twisting as if the very words are sour. “She’s stranded somewhere. Car broke down.”   
  
“Ah,” says Irwin. Oddly enough, there is not quite a sinking feeling in his stomach. He’s rather expecting there to be one, except there isn’t. Dakin with a girlfriend is no great surprise. “You should go then. Play the white knight in shining armour, or whatever.”   
  
“...Or whatever,” Dakin repeats the last bit. He hesitates, as if he wants Irwin to ask him to stay, but Irwin is going to cling to his last bit of propriety and refuse, although the corner of his mouth is still tingling where Dakin had touched it.   
  
“Just go,” Irwin says again.  
  
Dakin opens his mouth with, “You know,” and then he might have realized that he really doesn’t  _know_ , and he flips a casual wave over his shoulder as he walks out of Irwin’s kitchen.

 

 _"Stuart_.”   
  
Dakin stops short of the kitchen doorway. He turns around to see Irwin limping towards him like a very old man.  _Stuart_. He rolls the name over in his mind. It’s his name, and it suddenly don’t sound so horrible. He reaches out a hand and puts it under Irwin’s elbow to steady him when he gets close enough.   
  
“Yeah?”   
  
Irwin’s eyes are blue and vulnerable, but when Irwin leans forward several more bold inches, Dakin doesn’t see anything at all. He mutters something obscenely delicious like, “ _Fucking_  finally.”  
  
  
  
Strangely enough, it’s Dakin on his knees and Irwin sprawled out on his kitchen floor in the most undignified fashion. One hand is curled around a table leg for support and the other hand is tangled up in Dakin’s hair, pressing him down to his prick. Actually, Dakin should be Stuart. It’s not the first time he’s done this, and Irwin wonders who it was the first time, the third time, the tenth time --  
  
“Stuart, Stuart... _oh_.”   
  
Dakin is smirking, the incorrigible bastard. “Have a care with my name, you’ll wear it out,” he says, between pressing warm kisses against Irwin’s bare thighs, making him shiver.   
  
“You’re --” Irwin suddenly can’t seem to find any of the words he wants to. But whatever words Irwin might have found, Dakin steals with a clever nip to his mouth. Irwin finally says, “I thought I was...supposed to suck you off.”   
  
“I seem to remember,” Dakin’s smirk only widens. “But it’s the kitchen floor,  _sir_. Very bad for your knees. Can’t we at least make it to your bedroom like civilized men?”   
  
Irwin kisses his throat and is pleased at the whine that he hears Dakin make. “Call me ‘sir’ again and I will kill you.”   
  
.  
  
Later, much later, after the sheets are completely soiled and tossed -- that much later, Dakin notes that Irwin -- Tom still has on his glasses. He reaches over to take them off, only to be deterred by fingers clamping hard around his wrist.   
  
“No.”   
  
“D’you sleep with them on, then?”   
  
Irwin says, “No.”   
  
“Christ.” Dakin makes a helpless gesture with his hands. “I just sucked you off. So apparently, his glasses are Warsaw; it even sounds ridiculous in his head.   
  
“Next time.” Irwin rubs soothing circles against his skin. There’s a quietly satisfied smile on his face.  
  
“That’s what you said last time.”   
  
“I lied, I’ve become good at it.” Irwin leans over and kisses him, licking slow leisurely circles around his mouth. Dakin thinks Irwin is very -- too good with his tongue.   
  
“You were better at it than me.”   
  
“At what?” Irwin looks at him.  
  
“This sucking off...thing,” Dakin finishes awkwardly after a moment. Choosing another term for it would give way to unnecessary connotations.   
  
“I should be, you aren’t even that way inclined, if my memory serves.” Irwin’s lips are twitching.   
  
“Yeah, I’ve wondered about that.” Dakin turns his eyes towards the ceiling. Abruptly, he changes the subject. “You know, I lied.”   
  
Irwin says nothing, just waits for him to continue.  
  
“I fucked up a case...you know, when I was a lawyer. After that I just.” Again, he cuts himself off. “I couldn’t. That’s why, I suppose. Do you ever think why?”   
  
“Everyone fucks up,” says Irwin, sounding plenty wise about it, as if he knows what he is talking about. “And no, not really. I find that I’d rather not know.”  
  
Dakin is exhausted and he can’t quite bring himself to reach for his clothes that are somewhere on the floor. But he remembers that Sylvia is still waiting for him at some pub. “I probably should go get my girlfriend.” After several tries, he manages to get up.   
  
Irwin watches him dress from the bed. Half a shadow is cast over his face. “Let me have a cigarette before you go.”   
  
Dakin tosses him the entire pack. It lands on the pillow.   
  
.  
  
“Stuart, it’s nearly midnight. What kept you?”   
  
Sylvia doesn’t sound particularly upset. She also isn’t exactly observant, either. Dakin probably reeks of sex. He only shrugs and turns a page of Irwin’s Anne Bolelyn. He’s read the same fucking paragraph five times now. “Something came up.” He doesn't mean it so much as an euphemism and Scripps isn't here to correct him.  
  
“Oh.” She stretches out her long legs on the bed runs a hand through her hair. “Are you ever going to stop reading?”  
  
“I’ve only just started.”   
  
“You read too much.” She rubs her breasts invitingly against his arm. “Put the book down, Stuart.”   
  
He hates the way she says ‘Stuart’. Hates it. There is a strange irritating buzz at the back of his head that didn’t come from drinking or almost sex with Irwin. He slams down the book on the table and snaps at her, “Just fuck off and let me alone.”   
  
“ _Stuart_  --”   
  
Sylvia looks as if he’d hit her, and for a moment, Dakin wishes that he had. But he just grabs his coat and gets up. “I’m going for a walk.”   
  
.  
  
Scripps’ hair is mussed and he looks utterly ridiculous in his nightclothes. He is still clutching a blunt pencil in his other hand, so that gives him away. He rubs his eyes and leans heavily against the door. “Damn,” he says. “I was so sure that your great legends of sexual conquest would keep until Sunday.”   
  
“Ha ha.” Dakin rolls his eyes. “You’re a fuckwank.”   
  
Scripps looks contemplative for only a moment, before he moves to close the door. It takes Dakin another moment to realize his mistake and he hurriedly wedges his foot in the doorway and tries his best to look pitiful, “Come on.”   
  
Scripps looks him up and down, “Sarah throw you out?”   
  
Dakin looks at once scandalized. “I own the flat, I can’t be thrown out of my own flat.” Scripps also can’t be arsed to learn his girlfriend’s name, but the logic behind that actually sort of makes sense; Dakin changes girlfriends so often that Scripps has long since given up on trying to keep track of them.   
  
“Well, someone threw you out,” Scripps smirks at him.  
  
Dakin wraps his arms around himself and tries not to shiver. It’s too fucking cold outside, but he isn’t going to say anything self-incriminating.   
  
“Don’t tell me,  _Irwin_  threw you out?” The amusement is clear in Scripps’ voice and he’s suddenly laughing, like he hasn’t ever heard anything so ridiculous. “Did you get to Berlin, then?”   
  
“Fuck off.” Dakin corrects him anyway. “You mean Warsaw, and I didn’t get anywhere close.”   
  
.  
  
Scripps wasn’t really planning on making Dakin anything, but Dakin is looking unusually pathetic, so he goes and heats up a pan of milk for hot cocoa, only to realize that he’s run out of cocoa. “Warsaw?”   
  
Dakin says, “I’m Germany.”   
  
“Ah,” Scripps nods wisely. That certainly makes perfect sense. Trust Dakin to equate everything to sex; even the unimaginable horrors of World War II can’t manage to escape such a derogatory fate. But then again, they’ve all learned something useful from Irwin. “So if you didn’t get to Warsaw, how far did you get?”   
  
Dakin makes an irritated noise. “Honestly, I probably stood on the German border and looked wistful.” If Irwin’s glasses are indeed the heart of Poland, then he’s certainly got a long way to go.   
  
Scripps bites down on his lip, effectively stifling a rude snort, “Sorry.” He half means it, sort of. He pours the milk into a mug and offers it across the table.  
  
“Who are you, my mum?” Dakin wraps his hands around it and sips anyway.   
  
Scripps just rolls his eyes. “Fuck off.”   
  
“You shouldn’t be saying words like that on a Sunday.” It’s technically Sunday, since it is already after midnight.   
  
Scripps rubs the blunt tip of his pencil. “And we all know you’re ‘holier than thou’.” A smirk is tugging at his lips again. “If I lend you my sofa for the night, will your girlfriend come and attempt to burn down my flat in the morning? As much of a humble abode as this is...” He trails off pointedly.   
  
Dakin downs the rest of the milk and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Maybe...I should stop.”   
  
“With what?”   
  
“The girls.” Dakin laces his hands behind his head and rolls his eyes towards the ceiling.   
  
Scripps lets out a laugh; he can’t exactly help it, “Well...March isn’t all that far away, you might try giving up girls for Lent. I’m sure that’ll make Irwin happy.”   
  
.  
  
Scripps has a crap couch. Dakin remembers him saying once, that the couch had once belonged to his grandmother who kept it stashed in her attic because she couldn’t bear to throw anything away, and it certainly smells like it still.  
  
It’s a long time before he hears Scripps rummaging around in the kitchen. “Scripps?”   
  
He hears steps, and then he doesn’t hear them. “What are you doing on the floor?”   
  
Sometime during the night, Dakin’s rolled onto the floor in a tight cocoon of blankets looking thoroughly undignified. “You’ve got a crap couch.”  
  
“Right...I keep forgetting.” Scripps stretches his arms above his head for a moment and rolls his eyes. “My fault.” He looks dressed for Church, fiddling with a tie.   
  
An insult is just about ready to roll off of Dakin’s tongue; instead, he sits up and runs a hand through his hair. “What time is it?”  
  
“Almost six. I’m off to Mass, I’ll be back in a bit.”  
  
.  
  
_“What’d you do on Sunday afternoons?”  
  
“What’re you doing this Sunday afternoon?”_  
  
It is late Sunday morning, already creeping close to Sunday noon, but Irwin has yet to find the strength to get out of bed. He thinks he would have made Dakin a pseudo breakfast with the nonexistent contents of his fridge and immediately finds himself pathetic for even thinking it. Dakin’s pack of cigarettes is still on the pillow next to him. He places it on the table and finally gets up to dress. He also slips off his ring and puts it into the drawer, not stopping to ponder what that might mean.  
  
After that, they probably would have read Auden, or Whitman. Maybe even Yeats, but he wasn’t queer.  
  
But this Sunday, like so many Sundays before, Irwin spends alone. He limps into the kitchen and notes a spill on his dining room table. His kitchen smells like stale sex.   
  
Irwin empties the kettle in the sink and watches the tea swish down the drain and tries not to think about that, either.   
  
.  
  
This time around, the taxi driver recognizes the half cripple that crawls into the back of his cab. It is not often that Irwin gets picked out as the ‘young historian guy on the telly’, and usually, he dreads the attention, but this driver considers himself an amateur historian, and he is an avid watcher of Irwin’s programmes. It is no surprise that he recognizes him right off.   
  
They have an almost conversation about Irwin’s latest project, except Irwin is mostly stringing him along because he knows the studio doesn’t like him leaking secrets. When the cab rolls to a stop at an unassuming curb, the driver asks him for a signature. Irwin fishes a blue pen out of his pocket and hastily scrawls  _Thanks for watching my programmes, Tom Irwin,_  on the edge of a yellowed newspaper from last week. It’s exhausting to think of something off the beaten track.  
  
  
  
“What d’you reckon she’s like?” Dakin says, sitting at Scripps’ kitchen table nibbling on a hastily put together ham sandwich.   
  
“Who?” Scripps does not look at him.  
  
“Irwin’s wife.”   
  
Scripps dutifully glances up from his scribbling to appear a bit thoughtful. “I suppose she’d be quite pretty...smart. With the right bits.” Everything that Dakin isn’t, but for the moment, he keeps that bit to himself. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t even been to his flat.” Scripps shrugs, because he really couldn’t care less. “Why does it matter?”   
  
“I guess it doesn’t,” Dakin agrees amiably. “She’s probably dead.”   
  
Now Scripps’ expression is a thoroughly conflicted one. “That’s so like you, but that’s also a horrible thing to say.”  
  
“It’s true.”  
  
And to think that Dakin, Irwin’s most devoted disciple would -- it’s laughable, really. “Who says truth has anything to do with it?” Scripps has seen Dakin stumble down this road many times, and he always ends up worse for it. “Ring him and find out, if you’re so desperate.”  
  
Dakin opens his mouth, and shuts it. “Fuck off.” Now would have been an opportune time to reach for a cigarette, except he belatedly remembers that he’s left his smokes at Irwin’s flat.  
  
Scripps watches him curiously. “Run out?” The notion in itself is a novelty; Dakin never runs out of cigarettes.  
  
“No, I just...”   
  
Dakin tells Scripps everything. Granted, spilling your deepest secrets to a journalist is a very bad form, but he can’t exactly help it. Dakin doesn’t believe in going to Confession, and he thinks to himself that Scripps could have been a pious priest in a past life; he'll do. They’ve certainly always kidded around about it. But Dakin doesn’t tell him, just like he doesn’t tell him about fucking up as a lawyer, or Irwin’s fib about Corpus.   
  
He doesn’t know why. Or likes to think so. He gets up.   
  
  
  
They’d only been married a short while, although it was hard to say who was the luckier one. In the end, Carolyn Parrish was the one that ended up dead and Tom Irwin ends up being saddled with guilt enough for ten people. So it’s hard to say. Although it is how history always happens.   
  
He lays a small bouquet of lilies besides a white tombstone. If it had been a month or more, he would have been visiting two graves, but that doesn’t make him feel any less terrible.  
  
Most epitaphs carried loving sentimental things like ‘beloved wife’ but Carolyn’s only said ‘beloved daughter and friend’, because she’d told him once that he chose the most horrible times to be honest.  
  
Below that, was Irwin’s contribution. Unfittingly or fittingly, he had chosen a gobbet by Shakespeare.   
  
_A rose by any other name would smell as sweet_. Rather ironic that he’s always brought her lilies.  
  
  
  
Or he could just ring Irwin and see if he was around. And that’s what he does, punching in the number as the cashier rings up his cigarettes for him.  
  
It rings three and a half times before Irwin picks it up. “Irwin.”   
  
Dakin almost lets slip, ‘This is Stuart’ and notes that it’s going to make him sound like an fucking sap. So he says, “This is Dakin,” instead, trying to push the spurt of boyish eagerness back down his throat where it belonged.   
  
There is a long pause on the other end and then he hears Irwin cough. “Hello, Dakin.”   
  
The cashier hands Dakin his change and his cigarettes and he wanders slowly back onto the pavement. “Are you at home?”   
  
Another pause, “No, I’m not.”   
  
“Work, then.”   
  
“As much as I enjoy my job, it’s Sunday.”  
  
Of course Dakin doesn’t really expect Irwin to tell him where he is, but a part of him is still miffed. “Have a drink with me?”  
  
  
  
It’s really easier to do things when the alleged euphemisms are out of the way. For whatever reason, Irwin agrees to meet Dakin at a rather fashionable bistro that he would otherwise try to avoid.   
  
He gets there before Dakin does and takes the leisure to order tea and pastries for them both. Dakin shows up ten minutes later -- in the same clothes that he’d worn last night, but Dakin is Dakin and still manages somehow to look halfway presentable.   
  
“Wait long?”   
  
“No,” Irwin shakes his head. “Not long.” He gestures a hand towards Dakin’s wrinkled ensemble. “Something happened last night?” It’s only partly rhetorical.   
  
“I spent it on Scripps’ couch.” Dakin shrugs one shoulder and samples his pastry. It gets one nod of approval. “And Sylvia’s probably called me twenty times by now. I’ve not checked my mobile yet.” He slides it across the table. “You can, if you’d like.”   
  
Irwin does, only out of curiosity. “Eighteen; she doesn’t love you as much as you think.” He slides the mobile back and Dakin takes to tapping it thoughtfully against the edge of the table.  
  
“I don’t think she loves me,” he says. “ _Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours_. It’s the only reason why I go out with them. From  _Ivanhoe_ , Sir Walter Scott. Had to read it at Oxford for something medieval.”   
  
“Ah.” Irwin nods, taking care to keep his other hand settled in his lap.   
  
Dakin nods, abandoning his mobile for tea. “I suppose you’d know something about that.”  
  
It is an open invitation for honesty, although Irwin leaves it alone. “Just a thing or two. Why’d you call me out here?”   
  
“Thought you were in dire need of good company,” Dakin smirks. “And you do owe me a drink, sans the euphemism.”  
  
Vaguely, Irwin thinks about the lilies. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” But his lips are twitching and it gives him away.   
  
But Dakin lets that go; he is actually looking thoughtful with his head turned towards the window. “What are we doing in a fucking London bistro, Irwin?”   
  
Last night, he was Tom, but Irwin isn’t disappointed; Stuart is Dakin, that’s something that is never going to change. “You said you wanted to go for a drink. We’re drinking. Tea.”   
  
At this, Dakin’s expression flickers back and forth from sheer amusement to anything but. “You’ve grown less adventurous in your old age.”   
  
“So have you,” Irwin points out humorlessly.  
  
Dakin does not answer.   
  
  
  
When Sylvia calls for the twenty-first time, Irwin makes Dakin pick it up. Dakin does, only because he’s just noticed that Irwin isn’t wearing his ring and appeasing him is a good way to get answers.   
  
“Yeah?”   
  
“Stuart,” Sylvia sounds immensely relieved. “I -- you didn’t come home last night.” Of course it’s easier to accuse him first. “Are you all right? Where are you?”  
  
“I’m...” Dakin looks to Irwin who sits with his arms folded on the couch. “Working.”  
  
Irwin’s face stays impressively still. Sylvia says, “Working... when are you going to be home?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Do you want to go out for dinner tonight? I bought a new dress.” Wherever she is, it sounds noisy. Which is good, because that means she won't want to talk for too long.   
  
No, Dakin doesn’t. She sounds so helplessly desperate and he despises her. “I can’t tonight, I promised Scripps I’d finish this, and it’s looking like it’ll take a while.” He doesn’t look at Irwin.   
  
“Stuart --”   
  
“Look, I don’t have time for this,” he cuts off tersely. “Call me later.” He hangs up the phone on her mid-word and glances over. “There, I answered, happy?”   
  
“That’s not even... Dakin, she’s your girlfriend. I suppose that doesn’t mean anything to you.” Irwin’s lips thin into a displeased frown. The expression he probably wore when he was scratching his way through their Oxbridge essays.   
  
“And this is coming from a man who’d lie about his wife --” But when Dakin glances down at Irwin’s hands, he nearly swallows his tongue.   
  
Irwin looks at him. “Go.”   
  
Dakin stares at him for a moment longer and goes. This time, Irwin remains sitting on the couch and does not stop him.  
  
  
  
“So you didn’t finish that thing... for Scripps,” Sylvia has painted her nails a hideous bright red, and there’s an equally red print on the rim of her champagne glass. “I’m glad; it’s been a long time since we’ve done something...you know, by ourselves. Marianne tells me the seafood here is supposed to be excellent.”   
  
Dakin stares blankly at his champagne glass.  
  
“Stuart.”   
  
He looks up. “Yeah?”   
  
“Were you even listening to me?” She frowns, clasping her hands together.  
  
He hasn’t really been listening, but he takes a guess. “Something about Scripps?”   
  
“I was saying, that I haven’t seen you at all in the two weeks and then some you’ve been working for him.”  
  
“You’re exaggerating,” Dakin says. “I’m around on weekdays.”   
  
“Yes, but I’m not.” Sylvia looks at him. “Look, I know what everyone says about you. But I’d like to think that you’re at least honest with me.” She waits until he’s put down his glass and puts her hand over his. “So tell me honestly: is there someone else?”   
  
Dakin’s mind goes to Irwin, and he wonders if Irwin is putting his cigarettes to good use. “I wish there was.”   
  
Sylvia’s face flinches, as if it wants to crumble. But it won’t. Dakin admires her strength, although he’s never liked anything else about her. She gets up from the table and stands besides his chair. Her eyes are bright. “What’s she like?”   
  
Dakin sighs a long sigh, “I don’t know.” That at least...that’s honest.   
  
She leans forward and kisses his forehead, “If I don’t make you happy, I shouldn’t be here. Goodbye, Stuart.”   
  
  
  
Dakin eats a lonely gourmet meal for one (nice as it is), and goes home to an empty flat.  
  
  
  
On Saturday’s forecast, the television had predicted rain. Eighty-five percent rain, and it’s raining sheets when Irwin opens the door for a rather drenched Stuart Dakin. They stare at each other for a moment. Dakin says, “...Why are you in a wheelchair?”   
  
Irwin says, “Tired. What are you doing here, and without an umbrella?”   
  
“I thought I should complete the interview I was supposed to do.” Dakin wrings water out of his limp tie. “I’m here with professional purpose.” And then he adds, “Think about it, we’ve already covered the euphemism and the drink. I don’t have any other reason to be here.”   
  
Because Irwin doesn’t have any other choice, he opens the door wider and gestures for Dakin to come in. Dakin possesses enough propriety to leave his soaked shoes outside.  
  
“Thanks.”   
  
Irwin says, “I’ll get you a towel.”   
  
He retrieves the towel, and then decides that he does not want Dakin to be walking around leaving puddles in his flat (nor does he want Dakin to catch cold), so he finds a sweater and trousers and tosses the pile towards Dakin, who is still standing by the door.   
  
“What’s all this?”   
  
Irwin can’t think of a good reason to lie, so he only says, “...Washroom’s down the hall to your left.”   
  
He watches as Dakin tiptoes down the hall, the man emerges a moment later with the towel flung around his head and he’s wearing Irwin’s clothes. Dakin says, “...This doesn’t feel professional.”   
  
“Our previous conduct couldn't really be considered professional either. I won't tell if you won't. Do you still remember how to put together an NDA?”   
  
Dakin just looks at him. “Is it because of the sex?”   
  
“Extremely subtle of you. Partially that. Other things...” Irwin rolls his chair into the sitting room and Dakin follows him. “I said one drink.”   
  
“So you think I’m here for sex, Christ.” Dakin’s eyebrows rise to his hairline. Suddenly, he’s laughing, shaking so hard that he has to sit down. Irwin crosses his arms and waits for an answer.   
  
Finally, Dakin stops laughing and sinks down on the couch. “Back when you taught me,” he rakes a hand through his damp hair. “Remember when I used to write like you?”   
  
“I thought that was endearing,” Irwin says. “But you stopped when you got to Oxford. I noticed.”   
  
“You keep my letters?”   
  
For a very long time Irwin just sits very still, too still in his wheelchair. “Yes.”   
  
“Why did you never write back to me?”   
  
Irwin inhales and exhales. “It’s a phase.” He fishes out Dakin’s packet and shakes a cigarette from it. “You left these, by the way.” He tosses the packet across the sitting room and Dakin catches it. “Whatever...infatuation you had for me, it’s a phase.”   
  
“Or you just want it to be.” Dakin lights his own cigarette and places the pack on the table. He stands, and walks over to Irwin’s wheelchair. “Grown men don’t have phases.”  
  
Irwin tells him, “I have phases. And phases always pass. Like this one.”   
  
Dakin bends and kisses his jaw, “ _Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber_ \-- that’s Byron.”   
  
Irwin grips a handful of Dakin’s shirt and breathes heatedly against his mouth. He can close his eyes, and see something close to fields of endless gold.   
  
  
  
Later, Dakin flips through Irwin’s dog-eared copy of Housman and thinks that Irwin is a closet romantic. “Housman makes us all saps,” he says. Well. That is not all that true, Housman’s made Hector a sad fuck. But he hardly thinks about Hector nowadays. “How many times have you read this?”   
  
“I --” Irwin swallows. “It kept me company when I was one and twenty. Kept me sane when I was miserable at Bristol.” He is covered with a blanket from the waist down, but naked from the waist up and right now, Dakin’s attention is mostly focused on a telling red mark on Irwin’s shoulder.   
  
“So at some point in your life...you were a sad fuck?” Dakin tilts his head, wearing a smug lopsided smirk.  
  
Irwin touches a hand to his glasses. “Why do you sound surprised? I suspect I haven’t changed much.”   
  
Dakin brushes his fingers over the mark. “You’re complicated.” Then again, he hardly knows anything about Irwin. It really isn’t much surprising.  
  
Irwin’s lips curl into a faint smirk, “You like complicated.” A challenge. He shakes Dakin’s hand from his shoulder. “If it’s any compensation to you, Oxford’s made you complicated.”  
  
He tosses the Housman aside, and it lands on a pair of discarded pants. Whose, it’s too dark to tell. Then he remembers that they’re both Irwin’s. “Why?”   
  
“Do I have to explain everything?”   
  
“I like answers.” Dakin catches one of Irwin’s hands, splays his fingers so he can squint at the lines on the man’s palms. A moment later, he adds, “Sir.”   
  
Irwin’s smirk melts into a softer smile, with a hint of exasperation to it. “Find your own.”   
  
There is a brief silence between them, and then Irwin leans over to kiss him, it’s a kiss that starts at the corner of Dakin’s mouth, trailing to linger near his hipbone, for a moment, he stays like that. Not for the first time, Dakin notes his glasses.   
  
“I’m beginning to think you never take your glasses off.” He peers down at Irwin, who stares back at him.   
  
“Not in front of you, I don’t.”   
  
Dakin runs a hand through Irwin’s hair. “Next time then.”  
  
“Maybe.”   
  
Irwin sits up again, “What happened to that girlfriend of yours?”   
  
Irwin has a splendid sense of timing.  _Splendid_. Dakin shrugs, “She moved out, said she couldn’t stay if she made me unhappy.”   
  
“So she loved you.”  
  
Dakin studies the man beside him for a good long moment; maybe it’s the Housman at long last taking effect. “Stop using that word. How many times have you ever been in love, anyway?” As if speaking of ‘love’ like poets did in old verses made him so much fucking wiser.   
  
“Attempted a handful of times...never successful. Does that make me a sad fuck?” Irwin’s eyes glint with a challenge.  
  
There are many things that he could have said, and many more questions that Dakin could have asked, but then, he thinks he doesn’t want to hear any answers; so instead, he says: “Tomorrow will be Sunday.”  
  
Dakin lets Irwin hold down his wrists and press him down into the mattress. For someone so frail, every part of him is warm. Irwin drops lazy kisses all over his face and neck, leaving faint prickles all over his skin. “So it is. What would you like for breakfast, Stuart?”   
  
“Anything but coffee.” When Dakin drifts off to sleep, he feels the familiar pressure of Irwin’s glasses against his skin.

 

 _History is just one fucking thing after another._  
  
Funny, how they’d all laughed. They’d all been young.   
  
Some things are entirely expected, like the fact that Dakin looks so smug when he drops in the next day, in the late afternoon as opposed to late morning. Scripps was always of the opinion that Irwin and Dakin will eventually fuck -- in all manners of the word, so it’s not surprising, even if it took them ten years to get there.   
  
Some things are altogether unexpected.   
  
The news comes a few days later that Jimmy Lockwood is dead. Wounded by friendly fire. Scripps promptly forgets about Dakin and Irwin. He writes an obituary and sends it back to Sheffield for anyone who might be interested. Jimmy’s funeral is to be held in London, and Scripps makes funeral arrangements. Jimmy had said once that he wanted to die pretending to be a religious man. The heavens might be kinder to him that way.   
  
He’s so busy that the days have all blurred together. Scripps does manage to guess the right day to pick up Jimmy’s mum from the station and offers her his spare room after borrowing fresh sheets from Dakin. She spends most of her time bawling and Scripps spends most of his time wondering whether to invest in soundproofing his walls.  
  
Lockwood is suddenly Jimmy – even Dakin, who is unsentimental as fuck, calls him Jimmy, like they’ve known him all their lives, and they have. This Sunday, Scripps sprinkles in peppermint in their respective coffees and neither of them have much to say. They also try to ignore Mrs. Lockwood’s sobbing in the background, even though Dakin looks thoroughly uncomfortable, shifting from one foot from the other.  
  
“How’s Irwin?”   
  
“Busy.” Dakin examines the mint flecks floating in his coffee. “Why is Jimmy’s funeral in London?”   
  
Scripps presses a hand to his throbbing temple. “Didn’t have time to make arrangements in Sheffield, and I didn't need the military to gripe at me, but I know a few people are coming. I got hold of Mrs. Lintott. Which is surprising. I don’t know if Posner’s coming. I left him a message -- several messages.” He sighs. “Timms promises not to take drugs if he remembers.”   
  
“Oh.” After hesitating some, Dakin reaches over to clap Scripps on the shoulder. “If you need anything, I’m around.”   
  
“You’re not the greatest person to bother under times of duress,” Scripps says flatly. “But thank you.” And then he remembers. “Actually, do you know if Irwin is coming?”   
  
Dakin shrugs, “Haven’t rang him yet...but I’ll let you know.”   
  
  
  
  
There is a quiet knock on his office door, and Irwin glances up from a mass of papers to see Dakin leaning against the door. His first reaction is still primarily wariness, but Dakin looks so unexpectedly sombre that the hard lines on his face eventually wear down to mild concern.  
  
Dropping his pen, Irwin looks at him. “Stuart.”   
  
Dakin steps into the room and closes the door behind him. He sits down in the chair across from Irwin’s desk and inhales deeply. “...You’re not going to ask me how I got past your secretary?”   
  
“I’m sure you have a thrilling explanation.” Irwin slides a cup of lukewarm tea across the desk. “But you look horrible.”   
  
Dakin says, “Tom, Jimmy Lockwood is dead.” He trips over the last words but manages to pick it up, along with the cup. He makes a face, but only for a moment and Irwin thinks he looks very pale.   
  
Lockwood was...dead. Out of all the boys at Cutler’s, Irwin remembers him the least, but he remembers that they were all brilliant. They still are. He only speaks, when he’s repeated the thought in his own head a couple of times. It doesn’t sound real.  
  
“How?”   
  
“Wounded by friendly fire,” Dakin shrugs. “Which is a poetic way of saying some fucking bastard in his own regiment shot him in the face.” For a very long time, he does not speak, and then he says --  
  
“I never thought Jimmy would be first.”   
  
Irwin looks him over, “You wanted to be first?” Dakin always wants to be first.  
  
“‘Course not,” Dakin looks away from him. “Just...not Jimmy.” He cuts himself off again. “Will you come to the funeral? Scripps is arranging with Jimmy’s mum. It’s at the church down the block from Scripps’ flat.”   
  
James Lockwood is dead.   
  
Past becomes present, but somehow, it doesn’t feel as if it is real. Although Irwin isn’t much good at funerals. He’s been to too many of them and even though he’s never found much of a niche, they don’t seem to be far away.  
  
“When?”   
  
“Friday, sometime in the late afternoon,” Dakin watches as Irwin pulls out a small black book and had the occasion been lighter, he would have made a joke about a sodding diary.   
  
Irwin’s countenance does not change, “I’m filming Friday...that usually takes all day. Sorry.”  
  
Dakin studies his face and finds that there is a coldness that wasn’t there before. It frightens him. He should probably argue, but he can’t find anything to argue about. “Oh.”  
  
A woman sticks her head in; she seems surprised to see Dakin there, which is just as well because he’s not supposed to be there. “Tom? Lesley would like a quick word with you if you’ve got a minute -- preferably sometime in the next minute? He’s rather irritable today.”   
  
Irwin says, “I’ve got a moment now.” He gets up and reaches for his cane. “Stuart.”   
  
Dakin purses his lips, “Yeah, all right. I don’t suppose we could...do something later? After...” It’s the most vulnerable that he has ever been, but thankfully, Irwin is blind to most things, even with his glasses. Maybe that is why he keeps them on.   
  
Irwin passes by him on his way to the door and takes a hold of his wrist; his hand is cold. Fingers skin and bone. Although it’s the first time that they’ve ever touched in public, Dakin feels his gut twist the wrong way. The usual chill shooting up his spine is strangely absent.   
  
“Yeah, of course.” Irwin’s lips twitch, and Dakin’s stomach sinks further. He doesn’t quite know why, but he still knows.  
  
  
  
_“At least you lied, and lying’s good, isn’t it? We’ve established that...you ought to learn how to do it properly.”_  Dakin had looked so smug.  
  
For his own part, Irwin thinks he’s already learned; more importantly, he knows he’s learned well. After he watches Dakin leave his office, he hastily shoves the planner back in his drawer. The page for Friday is blank; it’s always been, although his colleagues always try to drag him out for a drink. They film on Wednesdays because programmes usually air on Fridays. Dakin should have caught his lie, like he’s easily took apart his other lies -- or lie, rather, he’s only lied once before. About Oxford.  
  
“Tom?”   
  
Irwin remembers Lesley and his legendary temper, and he’s suddenly relieved. He walks out of the office, shutting the door firmly behind him.  
  
  
  
The church is empty, and Scripps sits in the very last row and keeps his head bowed; silence is a prayer in itself. He wasn’t quite sure when Dakin had slipped into the pew next to him, but knows that it is unwise to comment. Churches generally give Dakin the creeps, so Scripps stays quiet and waits. There has to be a good explanation, or so he hopes.   
  
After a moment, Dakin says, “You weren’t at home.”   
  
“And this is the second place you looked.”   
  
“Yep.”   
  
Scripps heaves a sigh. “Today isn’t Sunday. What do you want?”   
  
Dakin mirrors his sigh, and stretches his arms above his head. “About Lent. Do you just -- did you give up anything for Lent?”   
  
This...is a bit surprising. “Of course, I gave up liquor. Lent started a week ago.”   
  
“But you don’t drink,” Dakin points out with an equally pointed glance. “Isn’t that missing the point?”  
  
Scripps glances at his watch and shrugs one shoulder. “It’s the next best thing, I can’t really give you up for Lent.”  
  
“Now that’s funny.” Dakin rolls his eyes.   
  
For the longest time, Scripps does not say anything. To Dakin, his friend’s face looks wan and pale, like he hasn’t been sleeping. If Mrs. Lockwood is still staying with him...that is no great surprise. Finally, Scripps wipes a hand across his eyes and heaves a heavy sigh. “Mrs. Lockwood is a miserable woman; I hear her talking at night.”   
  
“What’s she say?”   
  
“Things,” Scripps says.  
  
As curious as he is, Dakin already has enough reasons not to sleep at night. He says, “I told Irwin about Jimmy. He’s filming on Friday. Can’t make it.”  
  
“Oh? You’re all right, then?”   
  
Dakin doesn’t know if he is. He merely shrugs, “I will be.” Because he always is. Besides, even if Irwin -- Dakin has lived ten fulfilling years without him; he certainly doesn’t need him. But the indignation boiling in the pit of his stomach isn’t something that can easily be explained away.  
  
Scripps unclasps his hands and turns to study him; Dakin doesn’t flinch at all under his scrutiny. Used to it, that is the only answer. “Why were you asking me about Lent?”  
  
His mouth suddenly itches for a cigarette, but he’s in a church, and deep down Dakin can’t deny his sense of propriety. “I don’t know.” It’s alarming, really, how the words just slip so effortlessly from his tongue, and then he says: “You’re praying.”  
  
Scripps’ mouth curl up into a faintly ironic smile and turns his eyes to his knees once more. “ _Most people do not pray; they only beg._ ”  
  
Dakin can’t help but agree, although he can’t quite place the quote. He too, bows his head and keeps quiet.  
  
  
  
At James Lockwood’s funeral, there is a clear divide. His stiff army friends sit on the right and his friends from his private life sit on the other side. Regardless, both sides are well-attended and James Lockwood is clearly a likable young man whose life ended well before his time. Irwin doesn’t think that Lockwood has ever professed to be religious, but he was probably too preoccupied by people like Dakin to notice the little details. He purposely arrives late and finds a seat next to some stern young man in uniform who barely spares him a glance.  
  
Irwin has also conveniently forgotten his cane at home, but he thinks that the gnawing pain in his leg is a much needed distraction. He dislikes funerals; always has. Although these boys were, and still are his crowning glory, they lead lives that he’s only dreamt about. And everything that came after has proven to be all but utter shit. (Here, he can at least pretend to feel accomplished.)   
  
He watches as Scripps escorts a woman wrapped in a black shawl up to the stage. Lockwood’s mother, Irwin thinks, without glancing down at the programme he is crumpling with nervous hands. They have the same eyes.  
  
She reads aloud from a piece of paper, her voice bravely steady. These are a mother’s words. Irwin closes his eyes and wonders if his own mother would ever say these things about him. It’s a futile fleeting wonder, and he opens his eyes again. He’s become old enough so that he no longer likes things that are far away and fleeting.   
  
Irwin thinks that he recognizes the backs of some heads: Scripps, Akhtar, Timms, Rudge, there’s an elderly woman who looks suspiciously like Dorothy Lintott. And Dakin, of course Dakin. They sit in a close familiar huddle, as if time and their lives apart have made no difference. He also looks around for Posner, but does not find him.  
  
Hadn’t exactly expected to, either.   
  
  
  
_Tom Irwin is a fucking bastard._  
  
Dakin sees him, there in the back on the opposite side, next to one of Jimmy’s army friends. Again, he wonders how Lockwood managed to stay alive for so long in the army; Dakin would have put a hole through his own head out of boredom long before someone else ventured to do him the favour.  
  
When he’d last looked, the spot next to the door had been very much unoccupied. Now Irwin sits there, looking pale and pained. He must have snuck in halfway through. Dakin looks again and sees that Irwin doesn’t have his cane with him.  
  
The priest is bidding everyone to bow their heads in silent prayer, Dakin does, but he keeps his eyes open.  
  
Irwin gets up to leave and --  
  
  
  
“Where’s your cane?”   
  
Irwin stops. Except he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t even want to see Dakin’s face because then he might change his mind. Maybe he’s not as learned as he thinks he is. “I don’t need it for short excursions.”   
  
“I suppose you don’t.” Dakin is standing close enough so that Irwin can hear him breathing. “If you finished filming early, you should have told me, rang or something.”   
  
A sense of helplessness has gripped him, much like before. Except this time, Irwin knows that he doesn’t have the usual excuses to cling to. He breathes in deeply and exhales again. “I finished filming,” and then he adds belatedly: “On Wednesday. I actually wasn’t planning to come.”   
  
“You lied.” At least this time, Dakin doesn’t sound surprised. (Good on him.) The sentence just sort of hangs there, unfinished.  
  
Irwin nods. “And you believed me.” He waits for another half beat. “Again.”   
  
Dakin does not say anything, and curiosity finally gets the better of Irwin so he turns around. “Why would you lie about something like this, anyway?” It’s an honest question, which is funny, because neither of them like honesty. They’ve even admitted it -- honestly.   
  
“I hate funerals,” Irwin says. “Always have.”   
  
The expression on Dakin’s face tells Irwin that he doesn’t understand. He shouldn’t. He’s a boy, a boy who has everything that he could ever want. There is a familiar pang in Irwin’s chest, making it hard for him to breathe. It could only be jealousy. “Irwin.” His mouth had looked like it wanted to form ‘Tom’ but in the end, he decides to be safe. The single word falters into a question and Irwin just watches him.   
  
“Stuart.” The name feels awkward, like the syllables have been tangled up. “You should get back inside.”  
  
“You’re just leaving, then.”  
  
Irwin shrugs, “They’re your friends, aren’t they?”  
  
Dakin sets his jaw stubbornly and stays. “Now, of all times, you’re shying away? Jesus, you’re really --”  
  
“It’s not shying away so much as a strategic retreat,” Irwin insists, touching a hand briefly to his glasses. “Besides, Lockwood is dead...and this is mad, don’t you see?” There are much more eloquent ways to say this, but Dakin never listens to eloquence. He’ll listen to brash reason, although Irwin hardly has the reasons to give him. The only reason that he has is the fear grasping at the base of his spine and the stinging pain in his leg. “You have a future ahead of you. Miring about with the likes of me...you were a lawyer once, you should know these things.”   
  
A bitter laugh leaves Dakin’s throat, making him sound like a strangled dying animal. Then he hisses, eyes flashing with more hurt than anger. It hurts him so much that Irwin almost has to look away. “So after a month of fucking, you suddenly decide to think about my bloody future? You’re fucking  _unbelievable_.”   
  
“Yes,” Irwin deadpans, noting Dakin’s white-knuckled fists. “After a month of fucking, I’ve come to my senses and I’m thinking about your future.” He pauses. “That’s all it is, isn’t it, Dakin? Fucking?”   
  
The church bells toll above them in grave disapproval, and Irwin heads for the nearest taxi. Dakin calls after him, voice strained with something strange like exasperation, “Much madness is divinest sense.”  
  
Suddenly, Irwin can’t even bare to look at him. So he doesn’t, but he stops at the curb and raises his hand for a taxi. “Much sense, the divinest madness -- or have you forgotten?” Boys forget easily. When he climbs into the cab, Dakin is still standing there, looking much too forlorn. He does not turn to go.  
  
Boys forget easily. They always have, always will. Irwin clings to that thought -- even if it is a thin fraying thread, because it makes him feel a little less awful.  
  
  
  
The funeral is over; there’s no body for them to view because no one wants to pay their last respects to only half of Jimmy’s face, so Dakin joins the other guests to say good-bye to a closed pine casket instead. He’s paid for it, and Mrs. Lockwood picked it out a few days before. It’s surreal, buying a coffin for one of your friends. But he can’t focus, not even when they lower him into the ground and shovel dirt over the casket.   
  
Already, Scripps is looking at him up and down and Dakin knows that he has to start thinking of a plausible explanation. But he doesn’t find one; instead, he finds himself inviting his former schoolmates and Mrs. Lintott back to his flat for a drink (since he no longer has Sylvia to worry about). Mrs. Lintott politely refuses and the others don’t sound particularly enthusiastic, but they agree, probably because free liquor is involved.   
  
Scripps promises to show later after he has driven Mrs. Lockwood to the train station.  
  
  
  
It’s been years since all of them have gathered into one room for a proper drink. Crowther is caught up in Berlin, and of course Posner isn’t there, but of course they’d never talk about it. They’d just lost one friend, it seemed unwise to discuss the hypothetical loss of another.  
  
A few drinks make everyone groggy, but it doesn’t make things any less awkward. Silence reigns after numerous attempts at conversation have fallen flat. Jimmy Lockwood once said something about “silence being the only proper response”. Or maybe it isn’t Jimmy, it’s some poet, who might be queer. No one remembers.  
  
Or cares. It is at least an attempt towards a tribute.  
  
Scripps does show when everybody is fairly drunk and Timms extends a glass to him with a somewhat shaky hand. Scripps takes it, and Dakin wonders whether to remind him that he’s given up liquor for Lent. Scripps settles on the couch between Ahktar and Rudge, who shift over to make room for him.  
  
“So what’d I miss?”  
  
Ahktar holds a half empty glass at a dangerous tilt and says, “Not very much, we’re getting to be too drunk for intellectual conversation.”   
  
There are vague murmurs of agreement. Scripps pretends to sip from his drink. Dakin knows that he is pretending.   
  
Timms finally says, “Hey, anyone heard from Irwin lately? I watch his programmes at the weekends, great stuff. I thought I saw a bloke that looked like him in the back.”   
  
Dakin opens his mouth, but Scripps’ voice speaks for him instead. “I’m running a piece on Irwin for the magazine soon, might have sent him something. Thought it was proper.”  
  
Proper, fuck proper. Dakin knocks back the remainder of his drink in a vicious gulp and slams the glass down on his knee.  
  
“I wonder why he didn’t stick around to say hello?”   
  
They are all really too drunk to care (well, except Dakin, but he’s long since perfected lying). At length, Rudge reaches to grope around on the table for a new drink, only to realise that the cans and glasses are all empty. “Don’t you have anything else to drink?”   
  
Without missing a beat, Dakin waves hazily towards the kitchen. “...There’s probably still some bourbon or something in the fridge, help yourself.”   
  
  
  
Scripps is not drunk, but he is exhausted and Dakin’s couch is comfortable. The others have stumbled off to who knows where, back to their normal lives. They’ve reached a tentative agreement to do this again sometime very soon, except next time, they’ll all chip in for the booze, even though Dakin is clearly the one who is filthy rich. Scripps has an oddly horrible feeling that ‘next time’ is probably going to be after the next funeral.  
  
Whose? Posner’s, maybe. Or Dakin’s, more likely. Possibly Timms’, if he keeps up the drugs on the weekends.   
  
Dakin is sitting in his armchair, flicking a lighter on and off, sucking contentedly on a cigarette. Abruptly, he changes the subject. “Irwin lied to me. He doesn’t film on Fridays.”   
  
Scripps focuses on a strange brown stain on Dakin’s ceiling, and wonders if Dakin’s ever noticed it before. “This surprises you?”  
  
Dakin exhales. “It’s not supposed to, is it?” He feels a bit stupid.   
  
Now Scripps can do little else but raise an eyebrow, the mere thought of Stuart Dakin labouring over lost love -- or certainly everything that could have been, is a grand novelty. “ _Man is in love and loves what vanishes_.” The quote tastes strange with the stale liquor in his mouth. Jimmy is dead, and for a moment they can both wonder.  
  
Dakin thinks for a minute. “Yeats?” Someone not queer, for once. It’s refreshing. He is not quite sure what Scripps means to imply by the gobbet, but he is going to leave that particular curiosity alone. “Scripps, you gave up liquor for Lent.”  
  
“I don’t remember.” Scripps just shrugs, rubbing at his eyes. Dakin looks at him for a long time and goes to fetch him an extra blanket. By the time he returns, Scripps is snoring softly into a cushion. Dakin curses himself for being a sentimental fuck, covers him up, and goes to bed.  
  
  
  
Dakin had called Hector a ‘sad fuck’ that one night out of jest, and it’d been amusing enough in a grotesque sort of way; they'd laughed about it. Except now that Irwin thinks about it, the description is a fit for him, too.   
  
It has started to rain again, and Irwin gives up his cane for his wheelchair. There’s a terrible pain in his leg. But it’s all right this time, there’s no one here to see. It’s been two days since Jimmy died and he hasn’t done much other than bury his copy of Housman in his closet so deep where no one would dare to find it again.   
  
Of course he’s gone to work and signed on a new series about the Industrial Revolution, which is set, it’s not one of Irwin’s favorite subjects because it’s not at all off the beaten track, but it’s a distraction.  
  
It seemed like so long ago, but Irwin can close his eyes and distinctively remember how sombre Hector’s eyes had looked when he’d said:  _“Don’t touch him. He’ll think you’re a fool.”_  
  
Irwin wonders about that; he wondered about it when Dakin came over on Saturday nights and didn’t go home until late Sunday night when Irwin reminded him he had work on Mondays. He doesn’t think that Dakin sees him as a fool; however, James Lockwood’s death reminds him that Hector is also dead. Most journalists work well on an ambiguous moral compass...but Irwin must at least try to respect the dead.  
  
Hector knows what it’s like. He knows better than anyone else, the boys were his pride and joy. The boys used to make him unhappy. Of course he would know.  
  
So does Carolyn. Or Irwin thinks she does, deep down, even if she hadn’t been poetic enough to find words for it.  
  
Actually, the only person who doesn’t know is Irwin himself. Which really does shed a new light on things. His phone is ringing again, for the nineteenth time. And for the nineteenth time, Dakin will leave him a message and quote him some sort of poetry. Irwin waits until the ringing stops before he goes to listen. If it’s still ringing, he might be tempted to answer.  
  
This time, it’s someone French. Verlaine. ( _Il pleure dans mon couer comme il pleute sur la ville_  --) Irwin’s throat is too tight and he quickly snaps his phone shut. But he keeps all of Dakin’s messages and doesn’t delete them. He knows that he really should, but he’s  
  
Just like a sad fuck.   
  
  
  
A thick pile of paper thwacks Scripps unceremoniously on the head and he usually would have cursed, except it’s Dakin standing there, so he doesn’t. “What’s this?”  
  
“You gave it to me Thursday.”   
  
“Oh.” Scripps glances briefly at the top page. It’s an article written by a graduate that they’d just hired. No chances for publication, but he’d asked Dakin to look it over because he needed to find something for him to do, and Dakin had slashed through it mercilessly with red ink. “I said you had a week.”   
  
“I had some time...so.” Dakin shrugs. “What university was he at again?”   
  
“She,” Scripps corrects him, putting the pile aside. “She was at Bristol.”   
  
Dakin’s expression flickers, “Bristol.” He repeats the word, as if it’s some foreign term he suddenly did not know how to comprehend.   
  
Scripps says, “Is there a problem? If everyone went to Oxford or Cambridge, we’d all be a lot less remarkable.” Dakin needs to be remarkable. “Besides, what do you have against Bristol anyway?”  
  
Dakin bites his lip, “I haven’t anything against Bristol -- and I have a date, so don’t ring me unless it’s important.”   
  
“With Irwin?”   
  
Dakin does not say anything for a long moment, it’s too long of a pause. “No, with Isabelle. I met her at a poetry reading a few days ago.”  
  
“Since when do you attend poetry readings?” Scripps raises an eyebrow, Dakin is unpredictable, but attending a poetry reading is a bit far-fetched, even in Scripps’ capable imagination; it’s nowhere near adventurous enough.  
  
A noisy sigh leaves Dakin’s throat and he turns to leave. “Just fuck off.”   
  
Scripps lets him go, because his phone is ringing -- “Yes, Donald Scripps speaking.”   
  
There is a brief silence, and then: “This is Irwin.”   
  
Irwin. Scripps considers calling for Dakin, who can’t be that far away since the lifts are at the very end of the hallway, but then again, Dakin is difficult. “Hello sir,” he says quietly. “What can I do for you?”   
  
Irwin’s voice sounds very thin and vulnerable, not steady. “Scripps, I think I need a favor.”   
  
Scripps says, “I’m listening.” And does.  
  
  
  
“You Irwin?”  
  
Irwin’s head snaps up, and he almost drops the phone. His mouth is suddenly itching for a cigarette, but he hasn’t smoked since his last encounter with Dakin, and really, he’d rather like to keep it that way. He hastily unclenches his fingers, noting that his knuckles are bloodless and white. On his desk, there’s a cup of tea, but no letter for him to crumple up. Dakin has stopped writing.  
  
A man stands in his doorway, smug and suited. It’s Dakin, Irwin thinks, irrational panic suddenly filling his chest. And then he blinks again, and it isn’t. It’s a much older man who tries to hide his receding hairline by wearing loud obnoxious ties. It fools no one, but everyone is smart enough to hold their tongues. This man is Morrison, one of the executives, and Irwin has heard all sorts of horror stories about him, though he and Morrison have yet to cross paths.   
  
Feeling suspiciously self-conscious, Irwin touches a hand to his glasses to make sure they aren’t slipping. They aren’t, and he feels safer. “Yes, I’m Tom Irwin, how may I help you, Mr. Morrison?”   
  
Morrison looks him up and down. “Irene tells me you’ve been running late on your notes for the Industrial Revolution programme. Not up to your usual standards.”   
  
And he has, Irwin has been running on less than an hour of sleep each night, and his notes have been getting less than spectacular as of late, filming has already been set back several times, and none of it’s because of Dakin. None of it. He searches for an excuse, does not find one, and says --  
  
“I’m thinking of writing a book, I suppose I was preoccupied.”   
  
“A book?” Morrison’s eyebrows look threatening, but he also looks properly perplexed, which makes for an odd expression. “What about?”   
  
“Erm,” Irwin rubs the bridge of his nose for inspiration. None came, and he grabs the first word he can think of. “Sheffield.”   
  
“...Sheffield, up north?”   
  
Irwin bites his tongue. “I lived there for a while, found it a fascinating town. Everything has a history.”  
  
Morrison seems to think this over, and he plants his hands down on Irwin’s desk. “Fine, take a few days, take a holiday and go to Sheffield. It’d help clear your head.”  
  
“The programme,” Irwin says. “If I’m not here, it’s going to be delayed.”   
  
“We’ll get someone else, Lewiston needs something to do. He’s nothing next to you, but we’ll manage. Besides, if you’re always off somewhere else, you’re just as bad as he is.” Morrison turns to go. “Have fun in Sheffield.”   
  
  
  
This is getting ridiculous.  
  
Dakin works up the courage to directly call the station and asks for Tom Irwin. Actually, he is at a complete loss about what to say, he only knows that he has to try to say something since assorted gobbets have already failed him. He is instead redirected to someone named Morrison, who informs him that Mr. Irwin had gone on holiday for an indeterminate amount of time.   
  
“Where?” Dakin’s tongue feels too thick in his mouth.   
  
There is a slight pause on the other end. “Sheffield, I think? He says he wants to write a book.”  
  
Dakin does not say anything. He can’t.  
  
“Anyway, would you like to leave a message with an assistant? I’ll trans --”   
  
“No, it’s quite all right, thank you.” Dakin hangs up the phone and hits his mattress face first.  
  
  
  
Irwin spends the first two days of his alleged holiday sulking in his flat, confined to his wheelchair. Sulking, because there’s no one else around to see him at his absolute worst and that in itself is liberating. He tries to read, and then he tries to write (not about Sheffield, heavens no). He is only mediocrely successful at both. Somehow, that is not so surprising.   
  
On the third day, Irwin finally gives in and throws some clothes in a bag and takes the morning train to Sheffield. He hasn’t been back since. He never really thought that he could return. It’s the same principle of why he never sets foot into Oxford, but at the end of the day, the logic is thoroughly unreasonable.   
  
Sheffield hasn’t changed all that much, save for a population increase, all the buildings and pubs are mostly in their proper places. He goes into one and orders a few drinks, comes out an hour later halfway tipsy and manages to book a room for a week at some inn. The sheets look like they need a few good washes. Irwin isn’t at all sure he’ll even be here a week. He genuinely hopes not.  
  
Irwin hails a taxi and has it drive to Cutler’s. Cutler’s Grammar School looks different, as if it has undergone several renovations since his last visit. That is also not so surprising. He gets out and gazes at it, until the driver interrupts with a brusque:  
  
“Hey, don’t you want to go in?”   
  
“Not particularly,” Irwin says, and gets back in the cab. “I used to teach there,” he says to no one. It’s just as well; the driver is not at all impressed and offers him a cigarette. Irwin declines.  
  
Much later, he visits the unassuming curb where Hector had his accident, and just stands there wondering if he’s just too blind to see the skid marks from ten years ago. This is how history happens.  
  
  
  
It is Sunday morning and Dakin packs a few unassuming articles of clothing and buys extra cigarettes. He drives to Scripps’ flat and leaves his suitcase in the car.   
  
Scripps opens the door for him and looks him up and down. “You’re not telling me something.”  
  
Dakin shrugs. “I’m not telling you several things.”   
  
As per their routine, Scripps leads him into the kitchen and pours him coffee with thick honey. Scripps slides the cup soundlessly across the table and fixes Dakin with one of those looks. “I thought you tell me everything.”   
  
“You’re not my priest.” Dakin says archly.  
  
“Ah? So you did realize that.” Scripps wears a wry smile. “It’s relieving.” He traces one finger along the rim, grazing over a chip. Dakin hastily checks his own cup, and finds no chip.  
  
Dakin opens his mouth, and then closes it again. He contemplates likely insults, but in the end, he doesn’t say anything.   
  
Scripps lets the silence sit on its own for a few more minutes, and then he says, “So how’d your drink go, with Isabelle?”   
  
“Didn’t happen, I stood her up.”  
  
“Did you?”   
  
Dakin bristles. “She certainly didn’t stand me up.”   
  
There were many things Scripps certainly could have said to that, but the look on Dakin’s face is enough for him. He refills both cups, changes the subject. “Irwin called me.” Irwin probably means for the conversation to be confidential, but it’s also probably fair to give Dakin some notice that he is no longer employed. He no longer has an article to write, not to mention that sleeping with interviewees is extremely bad form.   
  
This gets Dakin’s immediate and undivided attention, as it rightly should. “Yeah?”   
  
“He cancelled on me, and now I’ll have to find someone else, asked that I’d understand.”   
  
“And did you?”  
  
“Of course I did, it’s not as if I had a choice in the matter.” Scripps carefully weighs the words carefully on his tongue before letting them slip. “This means that the two of you have stopped fucking?”   
  
Again, Dakin’s mouth opens and shuts. Finally, he says, “It’s not like that.”   
  
“No,” Scripps’ smile is twitching, although it’s hard to say if he is actually amused. “That’s too crass, I suppose it would be more poetic. A more fitting description escapes me.”  
  
“You’re  _enjoying_  this.” Dakin stares at him in mildly horrified admiration. Well, Scripps by his own admission doesn’t wank and all that. Sexual frustration has to go somewhere.   
  
“I try.” Scripps turns from him to put the coffee pot in the sink. “But by the way, I was thinking -- where are you going?”   
  
Dakin shrugs. “No idea.”   
  
  
  
It takes Irwin another few days to work up the courage to really visit Cutler’s.   
  
The place is cleaner than he remembers, and maybe the boys are less crass. He is not as young as he’d like to be. The nook where Dakin first convinced him to have a cigarette is still as suspicious as ever. The paint is still peeling from door, and he wishes he had brought cigarettes. A fleeting thought that comes and goes.  
  
Finally, he goes and visits Felix, whose eyebrows have grown significantly whiter. He does not seem to recognize Irwin at first, but when he finally does, he shakes Irwin’s hands so hard that Irwin thinks that Felix has gone and broken several of his fingers. It’s splendid to see him, really. Just wonderful.   
  
Dorothy Lintott ended up teaching for another number of years and just retired the year before last. Of course the miracle of ten years ago is unlikely to repeat itself again, but every year, there are one or two lucky ones to continue the tradition. By the way, Felix has heard about Lockwood, but couldn’t make the funeral, terrible tragedy, such a bright boy. Is Irwin looking back to get into teaching? There’s always a place for him here at Cutler’s. Head of History, if he’d like. The man employed right now is a bit of an idiot. To think he calls himself a Cambridge man, he’s got to be lying.  
  
Irwin shakes his head; he’s quite happy working in television, but thanks anyway for the offer.   
  
Upon further inquiry, Irwin finds that most of the classrooms have been moved into a new wing that was built on a generous grant a few years ago. But he’s welcome to go and look at his old classroom, they’ve mostly left it alone.   
  
“Thanks,” Irwin says and turns to go. “I think I will.”   
  
  
  
So he’s lied again. Dakin realises that lying to Scripps is becoming easier and easier to do, whatever that means. He arrives in Sheffield near eight o’ clock and drops in unexpectedly on his parents, who are overjoyed to see him. Of course, they don’t know that he’s no longer a lawyer, and they’ll continue in their ignorance. London is grand, they should really visit more often. He’s even moved into a new flat and liking it just fine.  
  
Dakin spends the night in his old room and smokes two cigarettes by an open window. His mum has never approved of him smoking. Then again, his old man keeps drinking as a hobby, so she doesn’t say anything, except to knock on his door before she’s about to go to sleep.  
  
“Stuart?”   
  
“Yeah, Mum?”   
  
“Are you happy?”   
  
Dakin rolls the cigarette between his fingers and stares at her. “ _Mum_ , why would you ask me something like that?”   
  
She looks old, but motherly, kind. “You look a bit miserable. I’m your mum, I know.”   
  
Which is one of the reasons why he never comes home. Dakin turns back to the open window. “I’m not unhappy.”  
  
“Oh.” She doesn’t move from his doorway, but she looks slightly less pale in the dark. It’s reassuring. Dakin stands up and smoothes the wrinkles out of the sheets. He walks to where she is standing, and she just gazes at him with knowing eyes. She touches the side of his face, and smiles a brave smile.   
  
“That’s good.” Slowly, she backs away. “Good night.”   
  
  
  
The next day, Dakin drives to Cutler’s Grammar School and marvels at the familiar sea of dark uniforms rushing from one place to the next, hard to believe that he used to be like them. But then again, Dakin has never been like them, not really.   
  
He makes his way through the crowds and stops in front of the Headmaster’s office. Considering they haven’t exactly parted on the best of terms, Dakin decides that it’s best to let that reunion well alone.   
  
Fiona is not the secretary anymore; in her place is an equally large-chested young woman whose breasts are spilling shamelessly out of her blouse. She smiles at him, her lips lined in hideously dark rouge. Dakin smiles back and thinks that Felix might get lucky this time.  
  
Mrs. Lintott retired the year before last, Dakin learnt that at Jimmy’s funeral. So it’s useless to look for her. The old classrooms are all but abandoned, the rooms bare.   
  
He finds his way to that room, at the very end of the hall, almost hidden next to the row of dented lockers. He tries the knob and finds it unlocked.   
  
  
  
Irwin almost trips over himself when he hears the door creaking open. He jerks his eyes from the window to the doorway, and he thinks that he must be dreaming. Or hallucinating. Or some strange nonsensical combination thereof.  
  
“You --”   
  
Dakin. Stuart fucking  _Dakin_. Is here in this room. Panic rises in his chest, floods over his nerves, and Irwin presses himself flat against the wall, as if to grapple for some faraway sense of security.  
  
“I called the station, they said you were on holiday in Sheffield,” Dakin says, because he’s the type to have a bloody explanation for everything. “So I um...wasn’t expecting this, though.”   
  
“Neither was I.” Irwin says, and hates his own voice for not being even. Maybe Dakin won’t notice. But he always notices. “I called Scripps and said I wanted nothing to do with you. Did he forget to pass on the message?”   
  
Dakin only shrugs. “‘‘S’not like I listen.” The gall of him to sound so fucking wise about it.  
  
Of course he doesn’t. Irwin forgets. Right now, he’s torn between wringing his hands together and tearing out his hair. Both options are equally embarrassing, especially in front of Dakin; Irwin quickly stuffs both of his hands inside his pockets to waylay the temptation. This is getting to be awfully familiar. He is not sure if he likes that at all.   
  
A tense silence settles between them, Irwin does not move from his uneasy post by the window; Dakin hasn’t let go of the doorknob. At last, Dakin clears his throat. “Did you suddenly forget you were fucking Lockwood behind my back? His death made you feel guilty?”   
  
Almost immediately, Irwin pales to a hideous shade of white-gray. Obviously Dakin doesn’t really mean it, but he’s long since learned that offending someone was the easiest way to get them to talk. Intellectuals like Tom Irwin not excepted. He watches as Irwin sputters and rubs the bridge of his nose.   
  
“No.” Irwin touches a hand to his glasses. “Why would you even -- do you honestly think I’m that easy? That I’d just shack up with the first bloke I see and fuck him?”   
  
Dakin measures a careful pause, shrugs again. “I hardly know what to think about you, honestly. If I had to guess...you’re not easy. Took me ten years, after all. Probably should have taken me longer. You’re a bit impossible.”   
  
“Perhaps you’re not as alluring as you’d like to think,” Irwin says blandly. “Whatever inspired you to quote me Paul Verlaine?”   
  
“I’m probably not,” Dakin only smirks amicably, much to Irwin’s surprise. “And Verlaine because...well, he’s another one of those sad fucks. Rimbaud made him that way.” Here, he pauses to seem smug.  
  
“So that makes you Rimbaud? If I’m Verlaine and all.” Irwin feels his own lips twitch. “You’re a bit of a  _l’enfant terrible_.” A bit. That’s being generous. He’s also not sure how he feels being compared to a dead French poet who might or might not be insane. It’s either that or Poland, and he isn’t sure that he wants to go back to that either.   
  
“I don’t think you’d want to shoot me,” Dakin muses, more to himself than to Irwin, it seems. He lets go of the doorknob and walks a few steps closer, and then he stops. Still enough room there between them for Irwin to keep breathing. “But...going back to Poland and Germany reminds me that I’m never going to get to Warsaw.”   
  
“It’s all about getting somewhere with you, isn’t it?” Irwin touches a hand to his glasses, as if he is afraid that they’ll just fly off and leave him vulnerable just because Dakin wants them to.   
  
“Is that such a bad thing? If you get somewhere, then things will happen,” Dakin flips glibly back at him, although the smirk that he forces himself to wear isn’t so reassuring.  
  
There is a pause, Irwin sighs. “Dakin, something did happen.”   
  
“All right, then...why have things stopped happening?” Dakin stares at him for a long long moment, “All that crap about my fucking future -- don’t you realise that my future has already passed? Tom, it’s not as if I’m a boy –” He cuts himself abruptly. “Is that what you’re worried about?”   
  
Irwin clenches his hands tight in his pockets and then unclenches them. He draws in a deep breath. “But you were a boy when I first -- when you first...” He falters.  
  
Dakin merely arches a mildly disbelieving eyebrow. “And that suddenly matters now why?” He moves to take a step forward, but then stops himself. Irwin already looks very much the part of a harried cornered rat. It’s rather pathetic. Dakin wonders at him sometimes, “Tom, we’re hardly the same people we were. _The years teach much which the days never knew_.”   
  
“Or maybe we’ve fucked over gloriously so many times that we’ve had no choice but to learn,” Irwin says dryly. “Or you’ve suddenly turned into a sap on me.” If Verlaine is any indication.  
  
For a moment, Dakin does, not say anything, “I’m not...” Then he looks away. “Death does funny things. I can’t come up with a gobbet for that.”   
  
“What happened when Hector died?”   
  
“You said this wasn’t about Hector.” Dakin’s tone is just slightly accusing.   
  
“It isn’t really...it was more about you,” says Irwin, honest for once. “He said that I...shouldn’t touch you, that it’d make me dreadfully unhappy for the rest of my life because you’d find me despicable.”   
  
“Was this before or after I asked you to suck me off?”   
  
Irwin makes a frustrated noise of sorts and shifts from one foot to the other again, his cane knocking dully against the wall a few times before he speaks again. “Obviously, before. You’re missing the point, Dakin. Stuart.”  
  
“Yeah? Tell me.”   
  
There is a lump of something not quite unfamiliar stuck in Irwin’s throat. “Aren’t you ever going to ask me about my wife?”   
  
“I thought you might eventually tell me.” Dakin looks at him, but for once, Irwin doesn’t feel quite so threatened. “Since I did already tell you that I fucked up. It’s fair.”   
  
“Fair?”   
  
Dakin immediately blanches. “Well, fine. Not  _fair_ , but...I bet you haven’t ever told anyone.”  
  
With a heavy sigh, Irwin knocks the cane against the wall again. “Would you blame me? Doesn’t exactly make for light conversations.”   
  
“Brilliant, I’ve never been a fan of those.”   
  
Irwin decides that Dakin is infinitely exasperating. “ _Stuart_.” He looks down quickly at the ground, he doesn’t want to see the victorious smirk gracing Dakin’s countenance. “You don’t care about any of these things; all you want is to prove that you can get somewhere.” Another pause, he takes his hands out of his pockets. “My mother wanted me to marry as soon as possible after the accident for stability. I knew Carolyn ever since I was a boy...I didn’t think it was going to be horrible.”   
  
Instead of offering some snide comment, Dakin is oddly thoughtful and quiet. “It was?”   
  
“It was, I despised her so much. Around her I always needed so much.” Irwin’s face contorts in something like pain. “I didn’t even know why. She died a year and a half ago.” He falters briefly, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Run over by a drunk driver while she was crossing a street...Carolyn was pregnant.”   
  
“You had a...” Suddenly Dakin can’t finish.   
  
“Would have had,” Irwin corrects him quietly. “I was so relieved.” Finally, he looks up. “This wasn’t like Corpus.” It wasn’t like Corpus at all."  
  
After a dreadful silence of sorts, Dakin inclines his head. He walks a few steps closer to Irwin, but does not dare to touch him.  
  
“I know.”   
  
“You aren’t even going to doubt me.” For once, Irwin does not ask a question.  
  
“I’ve grown up.”   
  
“You’ve already said that before.”   
  
“I was afraid you might forget.”   
  
“You made it impossible to forget -- I couldn’t forget.”   
  
And now, Dakin looks properly smug. Irwin is relieved again. He’s gotten what he wanted, and now he will go. Instead, Stuart doesn’t go; he stays rooted to the spot and looks his former schoolteacher up and down. Irwin bravely tries not to flinch.   
  
“What’d you suppose would have happened if we’d gone?”   
  
Irwin swallows. “I suppose,” he stops a moment, pretending to think. “That it would have been fantastically disastrous. You would have forgotten about me once you’ve gone off to Oxford. Sometimes, I think I would have preferred that.”   
  
“Now you think too little of me.” Dakin steps in close, closing the distance between them, and Irwin can hear him breathing, smell the comfortingly familiar scent of cigarette smoke. “What happened after she died? Did you shack up with some useless bloke?”   
  
“Thought about it.” Irwin refuses to look away, Dakin has already won once, he can’t win again. “Then I remembered your letters from Oxford and thought it’d be safer to cry over them at night when no one was looking.”   
  
“Really?”   
  
“No.”   
  
Dakin’s mouth twitches. “You, sir, are a devil.” He sounds much too pleased.   
  
Irwin does not say anything. His fingers only stiffen when Dakin reaches for his hand. His skin is warm and tempting. And then Dakin drops Irwin’s hand and reaches for his glasses instead; Irwin knows that he really ought to say no, but he still doesn’t say anything.  
  
Dakin grins and says, “Warsaw.”   
  
Irwin twitches back and says, “Give them back.”   
  
Of course Dakin has to dangle them above his head first, taunting him. Irwin could easily reach for them. “Can you see?”   
  
“You have a mole on the side of your nose.” Irwin pretends to squint.   
  
At this, Dakin glares at him. “I can’t believe I stood up a girl for you.”   
  
“Did you?” Irwin feels a strange tingle of warmth creep up his spine, it reaches the back of his neck and stays there. “I’m honoured.”   
  
“As I suspect you ought to be.” Dakin puts Irwin’s glasses back on for him and steps back. He turns briefly and glances at the door. “I keep thinking Felix’s going to come creeping around.”   
  
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”   
  
Dakin shrugs, “In your own words, I’ve become less adventurous in my old age. I’m almost inclined to believe you.”  
  
“Those words are yours,” Irwin reminds him, braver now that he has he glasses back where they belong.  
  
“Ah, so they were,” Dakin’s lips thin into a thoughtful line. “I’ve been around you too long, then.”  _How much of the human life is lost in waiting_? Emerson again. The fellow must have led a sad pathetic life, should have fucked Whitman when he had the chance.   
  
“Maybe.” Irwin keeps his voice light and noncommittal as he too, steps away from the window. His elbows are numb. “That should teach you something.”   
  
“Perhaps it already has,” Dakin is saunters towards the door, hands stuffed in his pockets; as if he’s already so damn sure that Irwin will follow that he doesn’t even have to look back. He flings the door open with a tremendous gesture, and then he turns. “We should go for a drink. A lot of new pubs have opened up...see what happens.”   
  
Irwin says, “...Yeah, I think I’d like that.” And begins to walk towards the door.


End file.
